Outside there is pandemonium in the street, the arrival of the military having ignited some incendiary spark. Stoking a fire that has raged beneath us for some time but that has now risen from cracks in the ground to lick openly at our heels.
Women carry screaming children into car seats. Fathers grapple with backpacks and other pieces of hastily packed luggage. A minivan backs blindly into the road and collides with the back of a sedan, sending both vehicles spinning out of control.
We watch as people tear up lawns and jockey for position, trying desperately to avoid the growing pile-up of cars.
It’s only when an elderly couple emerge from their home and wander into the road that the commotion dies down. Their bodies are swollen, the whites of their eyes red. They hold hands and drift dreamily along the asphalt before embracing each other in a kiss.
The onlookers watch in silence as their skin turns transparent and their bodies knit together. Their muscles and tendons merging into a purple mass before falling away, like petals, to reveal a network of nerves that intertwine and then splay out in the wind.
They rise from the ground and ascend, nerves cast behind them like the branches of a willow tree.
For a moment there is an unnatural stillness to the air, a delicate peace. Then a shot rings out, clear and clean as if heard from across the crystalline surface of a lake, and chaos resumes. The elderly woman, still cocooned in her husband’s nervous system, grows opaque, her pale skin reappearing.
Inside her body a cloud of red expands, like the butterfly of an inkblot test. I see a bullet lodged deep in the cavity of her chest. As she re-materialises and falls to the ground the nerves that make up her husband’s fingers reach out for her desperately. The shape of his anguished face outlined in furious red.
She lands with a dull thud and lies panting on the asphalt, taking deep laboured breaths that gradually slow, and he lifts his head skyward with a look of sad determination. Preparing for a reality he could never imagine but must now inhabit.
A second shot rings out.
This time the bullet meets a car windscreen, the sound ricocheting off the once quiet suburban landscape. People crawl on their stomachs to their cars. Others double over and take cover against the sides of houses. Children scream. People call out the names of their loved ones. Gradually the street empties.
Cars move slowly to avoid hitting the body. And though she reaches her hand up occasionally to grip at their hubcaps none of them ever consider stopping. The fact that they avoid her at all is a small mercy.