Saturday, June 7
I sat in my car tonight and watched hail fall for the second time this year on my garden. The hail was relatively little, and as I listened to it tap and pop on the car's roof I watched the smallest plants, the eggplant seedlings, waiting to see them get crushed and matted down into the mud. It did not happen. The hail tore a few holes in the sunflowers' leaves and broke one little branch off of a pepper plant, but otherwise nothing was harmed once again.
As I sat trapped in the car, listening, I looked down the street to see if the police were still there, but they were finally gone. They had been standing there all day and I was glad to see them go.
Friday night, June 6, two boys (ages 16 and 18) from a nearby town decided to park their car on my street and enter a house on the street behind us. The incident is thought to have started as some variety of altercation in a gas station parking lot an hour before, and is also thought to be drug-related. They arrived at the house behind us at 2:30 Saturday morning, apparently to continue their altercation with a resident of the house, a 20-year-old male. The 20-year-old guy, armed for just such an occasion, shot the 18-year-old, apparently in the face, and killed him. The 16-year-old, having brought another gun along, reacted by shooting the 20-year-old, also killing him. Then, as any panicky 16-year-old would with his buddy/partner in crime dead and having shot someone else for presumably the first time, he ran. Ran down the street and left the car.
I woke up at 5:30 to make the coffee for the Farmer's Market as usual and saw through the kitchen window blue and red lights blinking and shining on yellow tape and a red car parked where there usually is no car. I was pretty sure the police wouldn't tell me anything (which they indeed would not when Nate asked them later that morning what was going on) so went on about my business.
In the afternoon, Nate went out to play basketball and I sat studying Microbiology when I heard a knock on the door. I saw a blonde lady standing there through the tiny window pane and I opened the door to find that she was wearing a gun belt and was, indeed, a police detective. They needed permission to enter my yard, she explained, because there was something in the yard that they needed. She asked me to meet her at the back door, and when I did she told me that the needed item was a gun. There was a gun in my yard.
I gave them their permission and I walked over to the spot from which she indicated I could watch, if I was curious. Expecting to lay my eyes on some little pistol buried in the grass, I instead was more than surprised to see a loaded SKS assault rifle laying calmly on the ground, where it had heavily landed when our panicky 16-year-old friend tossed it over the chain link fence as he scampered down the alley. It looked so foreign, right there next to the tiller and the extra wire from the tomato cages, things that are familiar to me and part of my life coupled with something unreal and unfriendly, that had killed someone twelve hours before. Part of me wanted to pick it up and look at it to see if it was really there, was really real.
Instead I played it cool and went back in the house to let them take their pictures and pack the gun in an evidence box as I watched from the back bedroom window.
The police went away, and it stormed all night. That whole part of the yard is now a swampy mess.
The End.
As I sat trapped in the car, listening, I looked down the street to see if the police were still there, but they were finally gone. They had been standing there all day and I was glad to see them go.
Friday night, June 6, two boys (ages 16 and 18) from a nearby town decided to park their car on my street and enter a house on the street behind us. The incident is thought to have started as some variety of altercation in a gas station parking lot an hour before, and is also thought to be drug-related. They arrived at the house behind us at 2:30 Saturday morning, apparently to continue their altercation with a resident of the house, a 20-year-old male. The 20-year-old guy, armed for just such an occasion, shot the 18-year-old, apparently in the face, and killed him. The 16-year-old, having brought another gun along, reacted by shooting the 20-year-old, also killing him. Then, as any panicky 16-year-old would with his buddy/partner in crime dead and having shot someone else for presumably the first time, he ran. Ran down the street and left the car.
I woke up at 5:30 to make the coffee for the Farmer's Market as usual and saw through the kitchen window blue and red lights blinking and shining on yellow tape and a red car parked where there usually is no car. I was pretty sure the police wouldn't tell me anything (which they indeed would not when Nate asked them later that morning what was going on) so went on about my business.
In the afternoon, Nate went out to play basketball and I sat studying Microbiology when I heard a knock on the door. I saw a blonde lady standing there through the tiny window pane and I opened the door to find that she was wearing a gun belt and was, indeed, a police detective. They needed permission to enter my yard, she explained, because there was something in the yard that they needed. She asked me to meet her at the back door, and when I did she told me that the needed item was a gun. There was a gun in my yard.
I gave them their permission and I walked over to the spot from which she indicated I could watch, if I was curious. Expecting to lay my eyes on some little pistol buried in the grass, I instead was more than surprised to see a loaded SKS assault rifle laying calmly on the ground, where it had heavily landed when our panicky 16-year-old friend tossed it over the chain link fence as he scampered down the alley. It looked so foreign, right there next to the tiller and the extra wire from the tomato cages, things that are familiar to me and part of my life coupled with something unreal and unfriendly, that had killed someone twelve hours before. Part of me wanted to pick it up and look at it to see if it was really there, was really real.
Instead I played it cool and went back in the house to let them take their pictures and pack the gun in an evidence box as I watched from the back bedroom window.
The police went away, and it stormed all night. That whole part of the yard is now a swampy mess.
The End.
posted by sarah at 6:49 PM
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