Please note: this entry contains descriptions of violence and death that some readers might find upsetting.

I read this at Open Mic Night Monday, October 7, 2024…

There’s something about seeing freshly-dead, burned-up bodies that puts an air of frivolity around the day’s business.

The lives of four people, on a business trip, were rather suddenly and terrifyingly turned to charcoal.

Yes, there’s something about it. There’s something about being rendered unrecognizable by fire.

There’s something about being stiff and frozen in the position in which you must have had your last thoughts.

There’s something about being hauled into a crash bag and tossed into the back of an ambulance.

I know it happens every day, all over the world, but when it happens just north of Sandy Creek, it somehow means more to me.

It reminds me that I am in that plane or that car or that building every day, and there, but for the grace of blind luck, go I.

I wonder now if they had their affairs in order. I wonder whose heart was broken this afternoon as I watched, from outside my newspaper, the first plumes of  smoke rise from the ground north of town.

Do I have my affairs in order? Am I ready to leave my body behind, heavy and stiff and helpless?

And is that what life is about? Do some business, get a bite to eat, go down in flames?

Is this another one of those “make every moment count” speeches? Sure, I guess. The four people in that plane today might have been saints or satans, but now they are simply dead.