After Auschwitz

I asked a former prisoner, “Where is everybody?” She said, “You’ll find out, child.” None of us believed her, but we left a candle or a stone or a paper prayer regardless. We later learned that this whole time English sparkling wines were challenging the supremacy of French champagne, and a hostile public was creeping down a white sand beach. Stolen deities would tell us many other horrible things while machine guns swept the streets.

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The rusty revolver the farmer found in his field might be Van Gogh’s suicide gun. But why is it me who gets woken up by a daily gunshot? I haven’t tracked blood in on my shoes. Even cows are wondering what’s happening. Meanwhile, Marlene is resting at home with a cigarette and a beer and the dude that shot her whose nickname is Rabbit. It has nothing to do with forgiveness. It’s simply that one person in six hasn’t ever heard of the Holocaust.

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I was driving like I always do, as if transporting a heart packed in ice for a patient in imminent danger of dying, when outside Springfield a bird that was also in an exceptional hurry crashed into my windshield with the boom of a gunshot, startling me about as bad as I’ve ever been startled, but the strangest part was that there were no cracks in the glass, no blood splatter, no feathers caught in the wipers, nothing, just the greasy crayon colors of dusk smeared all around and the cold stretch of road ahead.