Impotent hands; impotent hands and eyes; imagination and conscience birthing a scream, but with such clean and impotent hands and eyes.
In the witching hour when all the souls walk again the dead mayor of Bucha and his dead children will jump up suddenly, like Lazarus, just as suddenly as they died. Grabbing their bicycles by the handlebars they will follow the wisp home they will live in their own house again, as they always should have. None of us can disturb them.
Bullets in their temples they will put wood in the stove. The living can only watch.
Evil everywhere and not just bad mothering but, there, breaking out over the treetops, gaudily lit, like a carousel, our own grotesques come floating into the world, wicked colors playing on our swollen faces, holding torches to light the marching way.
No, you know better.
The dead mayor of Bucha told me this: If you were to prevent it, lying there upon a field in winter, it would only take reaching down with one hand, and scraping the snow with a fingernail. The truth about evil is like the snow beneath your belly, the dead mayor of Bucha says. It is in and under your body, slick and cold. Reach down and touch it.