The Meadow 39 girls under sixteen, but is this as well, Viola-of-the-last-resort. She who is charged with vaporizing him from the earth he’s scorched after a court of law acquitted him for the third time. I watch him pace before his granite counters. Why do rich men’s kitchens all have those tomb slabs? He has that certain slant to his shoulders. I know it well. A man whose whole physical being is devoted to shoring poison against the psychic rust in his heart—he makes himself better with others’ worse. (Like myself). Damn. The thought interferes with the rhythm of my battle hymn, unsteadies my hand. I force the thought flat until it joins the slipstream of my hatred. He’s on the phone now, his temple shining, his hands roving. A mammoth abstract oil painting beside him that, though it contains luminous hot pink and magenta swirls ever falling toward a central vortex, seems to make the space more, not less, cold and sterile. He gestures, the kind of gesture that generally accompanies an obscenity. Best wait for the call to end. I keep his head squarely in the reticule as he paces, hunched over the phone. The smallest pressure is all it will take. There, now, a monster; next moment, a miasma, less than nothing, a mist in the air that the light shines through. An acid memory that will forever corrode the minds of those who survive him. (Or a victim). Janice—that’s the name she gave, not the one her parents gave her—told me through her sobs that her one daughter had hardly slept since he held her and her sister in the wine cellar of an empty house for thirty-six nights, and that her older daughter took her own life rather than go to court about it. “Please,” Janice hiccupped into the phone, “be our Angel of Death. Find peace for the only child I have left.” Apparently she and four other parents of survivors and dead alike had pooled
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