100

On the ground, I only wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep on a bench in the sun on a warm day as I had done once upon a time with Clarise in the city, my head on her lap.

I could feel my wound slide open.

The feelings did not come to me in sequence, but all at once, rage, regret, a certain sort of giddiness.

I had a hole in me. I was incomplete and bleeding. Drained, like I had just finished a workout.

I wanted the weight off me, the wet weight pulling me down like the gravity I felt when I was a boy jumping off the big, split boulder in the empty lot near my elementary school, the weight of my whole body pulled into my legs, my knees filled with water.

In this world, many people have been shot.

I had just shot someone.

But now I had a hole in me from Frank Butras’ bullet.

My clothes were quickly covered with blood, drenched with it. I thought of the wounds of animals and the flies crawling in.

When I was going down I thought: if people had seen me just a month before, they would have seen an ordinary black man who could disappear into a crowd of black men, no problem.