#PrayForNice
I am on the other side of the ocean, where things like that don’t happen
except
on Twitter
I did not turn on the sound,
& I did not hear the screaming the crying the praying the bleeding out the shouts of coaching not to fall asleep the begging too
expecting not to recover within a day,
because I knew my brain was getting
enough of the message through the mute autoplay repeating top-to-bottom down my gaming-grade computer screen my Twitter feed over & over little boxes of the suffering & dying flooded over the PSAs of the Nice police — Have respect for
the dead, the wounded & their families;
refrain from posting videos of the wounded
on social media
a Twitter search of “#PrayForNice” conflates all the “PrayFors”
a search misspells “Nice” as “nice.”
Behind my building, someone has kindly parked a truck the size of a dump truck. I walk all the way around the truck & count the steps around it:
So, that’s how big it is.
Always prepared for things like this, I dig my flashlight out of my purse, crouch, & peek under the bumper:
So, that’s how long it is.
I step around & examine the oily magnet the size of a card table:
So, that’s how heavy it is.
I duck again & peer under the undercarriage, look to the left, then to the right:
So, that’s how bumpy it is.
Twitter still had the party icon next to #BastilleDay when #Nice attack started trending.
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