Ryan Nourai in Esquire:
I was sitting in a funeral home in San Pedro, California, surrounded by carpeted floors, inaudible footsteps, and clasped hands. And then—I couldn’t help it—I imagined her body ripped apart. Would the powder in the bullet explode in the flames? My body tried to jump up from the heavy green leather chair, but my mind stopped it—of course the ammunition was exhausted when the bullet was fired, twenty-eight years before. But even though I understood this intellectually, still I asked my question out loud: “Is the bullet going to explode?”
The mortician—unaware of the assault my mother had survived all those years ago, when she was kidnapped, raped, and shot—struggled to understand my panic and my question. While my mother was alive, the crimes perpetrated on her in that alley remained abstract to me—a story. I knew one fact for sure, that had the bullet been, in the words of the neurosurgeon who treated her, “a hair over,” she wouldn’t have survived. I wouldn’t have ever been born.
Why, now that she was gone, now that her body was in the next room, was the incident starting to feel closer than ever?
More here.
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