After by Marita Golden Page A

words to talk about the end of the world as he has known it. The end of someone’s life.
    Carson drinks in the faces of his children. There’s no escape from Juwan’s gaze, the lashes as thick and lush as fur. Not once he turns those eyes on you. Carson studies the shapely head and the frail, almost feminine face of his twelve-year-old son that lives behind a veil of something secret and unreachable. As if at any moment, with the slightest pressure, the boy will break. The girls are olive-skinned like Bunny, their hair a mass of tiny twists, their toothy grins and dimpled, open faces gazing at him with so much trust. As a cop he is all too aware of the world’s darkness.
    He wanted more than anything to keep that darkness from his door. From his wife and his children. He had thought if the darkness ever entered, it would surely not be because of him.
    “You know how on my job I carry a gun?” he asks. “Well, last night I was in a situation that required me to use it. I had to shoot a man. And he’s dead.”
    “Like Uncle Eric?” Roseanne asks.
    “Yeah, like Uncle Eric.”
    “Did he shoot you, Daddy?” Roseanne asks meekly.
    “Does it look like he was shot?” Roslyn says harshly.
    “Don’t talk to your sister like that.”
    “But Daddy, what a stupid question. He shot him because he was a bad man,” Roslyn pronounces, glaring at Roseanne.
    “Maybe Daddy was hurt where we can’t see,” Juwan says firmly.
    There were none of the questions he had expected or feared, questions they would have not known how to ask: Was he carrying a gun? Did he threaten you? Was shooting your only option?
    “I have to be off my job for a while. It’s a serious thing when a police officer fires his weapon. Even when the person isn’t killed. So they have to do some things relating to the case. And then when they’re through I can go back and be a police officer again.”
    Carson is astonished at the precision and confidence he’s mustered. It’s all false. His hands are shaking slightly and he’s sweating again, all signs of the hellish state that has descended upon him, which he hopes his children don’t see.
    “Were you scared, Daddy?” Roslyn asks, gazing at Carson with that unflinching stare.
    “Yeah, yeah, I was scared.”
    “I’d be scared too,” Roseanne says, rising from her seat and laying her head on Carson’s shoulder.
    He would remember but he would not tell Bunny that Roslyn asked, as she watched her sister comfort him, “Daddy, why are you crying? Are you still afraid?”

3

     
    The immense gun.
The man’s quizzical expression. The object he holds in his hand. The thunderclap of bullets. Carson wakes, clutching his chest, convinced it’s his own blood, streaming from his chest, that’s filling the bedroom with a reeking, heavy odor.
    “Calm down, calm down. Breathe. Hold on to me,” Bunny whispers in Carson’s ear, her arms bracing him against her body. She comforts. She submits when Carson frees himself from her embrace only to push her beneath him, his tongue hungering for hers, his hands roughly shoving her gown above her thighs, his sex a shattering blow inside her. And when he is done, he still clings to her, Bunny on her side, curled tight to hide her wounds, Carson gripping her around the waist, skin to skin, body to body.
    In the morning when he is alone in the house, Carson remembers what he dreamed. And what he did. How he used his wife as a sexual punching bag. All to forget. But he didn’t forget. In the morning paper, filled with accounts of the prelude to war in Iraq, yesterday’s brief synopsis has become “Officer Shoots Unarmed Man” on the front page of the Metro section. The twelve-paragraph story reveals the name of the man he shot, Paul Houston, a twenty-five-year-old third-grade teacher in southeast Washington, who was a graduate of Morehouse College and the School of Education at Columbia University. The article quoted one neighbor of the family who said, “He