He Heard Gunshots on the Horizon

But, as he sat on the porch one afternoon trapped by beauty in nature, it wasn’t so much Thailand he was thinking of as his America that was supposed to be an example and a utopia to the rest of the world. Mesmerized by a sunset, transfixed on the morning star, more and more it hurt him as he watched the Thais swimming in the sea, some dreaming of going to America someday. Many afternoons the sparkling water and ever-changing sky held him prisoner in his hammock. He had no idea it’d be this way. An island of sand that waves nibbled at each day as a gunshot rang out in his homeland and took another life and deposited it in a garbage can. He couldn’t take his eyes off what to him looked like a painting in a fresco in Arezzo, Italy— a painting with only ripples of water moving in it as if he had somehow gotten inside and were waving a brush soaked in pastel paints. How could this painting contrast so much with another scene—the thirty-two graduate students shot to death at Virginia Tech or the entire family of eight shot to death by their own daughter on Christmas Eve?