Two years later finally I take a putty knife to the NRA sticker left by the previous tenant who displayed his affiliations from the front storm door. I’ve been too lax from life led away by other projects secretly hoping the sticker might act as some kind of warning like Passover blood keeping the angel of death away. A child, I knew the shots, felt the thuds in the wall, heard my father yell with the pain of the hunted, and I wondered if this was it, in my faraway home, if my life was to receive the wound: the rebel gunshot sound, the rocket and the grenade sound, the leaving and returning and leaving again sound, gone to a homeland that is hardly home.

Headlines now remind me just like fireworks: they take me back to the sticker and the bodies and the blade I guide again and endlessly again against the gummed-up emblem, raking away flecks like people who fall to the paved steps we will step on for the rest of time.