I drove by the scene of a shooting this morning. I cut through the neighborhood across from mine to get to the main roads. On the edge of the neighborhood, in a small diner’s parking lot there was a figure rolling back and forth slowly on the ground with several people clustered about. A short heavyset black woman must have come out of the diner and it looked like she had blood on her apron. A firetruck barreled into the parking lot from an entrance to the right of my car after deciding at the last minute not to turn on the street where I was sitting and squish me. No less than three of the people at the scene immediately pointed to a black mass on the ground that I had already noticed nobody would go anywhere near. I don’t see a lot of guns littered about on the highway when I’m driving but I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. A pickup pulled up behind me at that moment and I had to move along. A couple blocks down the road and I was sitting at a McDonald’s drive-through ordering a McGriddle.
Now I’m sitting in the office at my laptop. There’s a shooting victim somewhere in a hospital emergency room or morgue. Somewhere else someone who pulled a trigger feels guilty, scared, callous, arrogant, maybe a combination, maybe nothing. The black woman from the diner is probably relating the story to the morning breakfast crowd while her apron soaks in a washroom sink. There’s a gun in a plastic evidence bag sitting in a squad car on it’s way to the crime lab or headquarters or whatever they call in real life what I only know from television cop dramas. I’m washing down the last bits of my McGriddle with water from a plastic tiki-head cup and there’s a blood stain in a parking lot waiting to fry in the mid day sun.