An Yet Another

It was so sad to watch the horror that wasn't a story unfold. A trail hiked so many times, past the most spiritual of glades of green ferns , mountain spring waters sparkling down under the rhododendrons, never guessing that a where the wildcats and wolves no longer prowled, a place that had become almost too civilized for my taste, a vicious creature was waiting to slash and destroy someone who, fearless, had sought the exhilaration and tranquility of that mountain top in the bitter cold of winter. Someone who came from the real mountains, who no doubt saw these little well-worn hills as safe; and did not wonder at the name.

And I do not understand. They caught him quickly, almost amazingly so. He stood rigid in orange and shackles, and looked at the camera-- and there was nothing human in those eyes-- not even insanity. They were the fearless eyes of a predator and nothing more. We will pay to defend him in this state and others; and I hope the prosecutors made a deal so that we don't waste our money defending him from a death sentence.

After all, his execution ten days or ten years from now wouldn't change anything.

We won't be any safer with him dead than we would be with him in a prison . And a quiet, dignified, painless death is just not fair.

For him, a stalker, a predator, who was at home and roamed freely in the forests, who watched and waited, and, until this one, managed to not be seen, not to be noticed-- in and out of shadows--to be trapped forever behind walls of concrete, where the smell of the woods is replaced by the smell of chlorine bleach and disinfectant, surrounded by other men and their noise unending, not softened by the wind through leaves or muffled by pine needles-- to pace endlessly in the glare of fluorescent lights--- is not too kind a fate.

And I am sad because, with every one of these, we are ever more thoroughly convinced that we are not free.