Saturday, May 23, 2009

Alarm

It's nothing at all like the movies, where people just fall down and die.

I was taking a shower. Just early enough to guess whether I should eat breakfast or lunch. I get out, walk to my room - naked - and then I hear it.

Real gunshots don't sound like they do in the movies. In real life they reverberate inside your head and hold implications you can't even begin to fathom from the comfort of a cushioned movie theater seat.

Then I heard it: "Oh God, Oh God. Oh God, Oh God." I don't know how many times she said it. Just that sometimes late at night I still hear it.

Bullets in real life aren't like the magic ones in movies that cause people to collapse on the spot and stop living. Not just one, anyway. I could hear footsteps. A man pacing around downstairs, constantly asking, "Who else is here?" I sometimes hear that at night, too.

My heartbeat replaced the sound of the gunshot inside my head, beating so loud it paralyzed me. The door to our room doesn't lock, so I race into the one next to it, my crashing footsteps alerting the intruder downstairs to my presence.

My wet hands fumble with locking the door. I scramble under the bed and crawl as near the head frame as I can get, pressing my wet, nude body against the wall. I hear a rattle as the man tries to open the door. Banging as he rams his shoulder into it. I stop breathing. I hear more echoes of "Oh God, Oh God, No."

He eventually kicks the door down. Two blacks boots are all I see, and all I hear are police sirens washing out the sound of my wife dying on the kitchen floor.

No director could capture that kind of fear and anguish. No one in the world could know how you could possibly feel. How easy it can be for someone to kill - to take revenge - on another human being.

Preach and pray all you want. It can never bring back the ones you love.