by Bruce Han­ify  I can’t point to a day on the cal­en­dar, but I know it hap­pened, because one day I looked around and saw it.

My cur­tains were closed; the lights were low. I hadn’t had any­one over to the house for prob­a­bly six months. The sighs of the dead heaved across the dimly-lit nether world I now inhab­ited.  Hell had seized my heart and silenced my tongue. The winds of mad­ness drove upon my shat­tered gate. I looked around the dark­ness. When had it hap­pened? Had there been a spe­cific day?

It wasn’t a day, but a thing. There was the elderly cou­ple stabbed to death by two teens who knocked at their door just as they sat down for din­ner. The frail lit­tle cou­ple — farm­ers, born in that same Amer­ica my par­ents knew — died dur­ing din­ner. The woman had got­ten up from the table to answer the door. It was the last thing she ever did. In death she wore a look of res­ig­na­tion and sor­row.  Her brave, devoted hus­band had put up quite a fight. Of course, it was one of the chil­dren — their middle-aged son — who had to find his par­ents this way. Where do you go with that horror?

Some­time after that I brought home the movie Con­sent­ing Adults. Wow! Great erotic opener! Two sexy cou­ples get­ting to know each other, a pow­er­fully erotic scene that left you wondering:

Would they?

And then came the next scene. Eddy Otis kills his wife, Kay, by club­bing her to death. I turned off the tele­vi­sion and wept. I wept hot tears, but my heart was cold as ice. I pretty much quit watch­ing movies after that. Plato’s Repub­lic stands unre­solved: there are cor­ro­sive souls who cor­rode oth­ers. Hol­ly­wood is a mag­net for the spir­i­tu­ally maligned.

The straw that broke me was the fam­ily of four killed in Out­look. The elected pros­e­cu­tor and a senior deputy tried the case, but I, who han­dled the felony appeals by then and was con­sulted on pro­ce­dural mat­ters, was famil­iar with all the facts, and even­tu­ally inher­ited the appeal.  That case proved more than I could bear, though I yet live.  I was plunged into dark seas with­out a map or com­pass. It would be some­time before I crawled ashore, a weather-beaten, mis­er­able rat.

But I sur­vived, and became some­one entirely dif­fer­ent from who I had been before.

Books by Bruce Han­ify at Smash­words
Bruce Han­ify 2010 All Rights Reserved