Mindbenders

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The screams pulled me into the hall and through the open bathroom door, to where Uncle Dave lay in the tub dead; blank-faced, stupid-looking, lights-out-nobody’s-home dead.

The tinny screaming poured out of the tube on the counter by the window, where the Prime Minister of India was getting shot on CNN. The anchors scrambled to make sense of the pictures-the frantic crowd stampeding the exits, true believers moaning and pleading behind the podium, bodyguards taking down the gunman in a pile in the corner-everybody screaming, screams in bunches and too late, surely, hopeless, useless, for who, in that insane moment, was listening?

Only those of us across the world, on the far side of the room, where Uncle Dave’s head was lolling crazy, like a cup tipped on its side in a saucer, his tongue hanging, eyes open, bits of brain bobbing among the soapscum, the blood rolling down his cheek and fanning out in the water like spider veins. I reached out to touch his cracked forehead and then his eye, just to be sure, to know. A little hole nippled the glass of the window, cracks radiating like the blood in the water.

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