It’s in our eyes as we drive home from Fire Island. A red-yellow target. The sun hits the cement walkway and my childhood floods back. In the playground boys and girls ride their tricycles. Light bounces off the wheel guards. A whistle from a parent, whistling up the day Little Miss Muffet kicked sand at me. Fat sparrows bathe in the dirt between the cobblestones. In this suspended light a sandbox mother gives her small daughter a puff of cigarette. At the bus stop sunlight falls on the street, on buses and trucks, on cars and taxis. At home I see shadows of leaves on the windowpane. The light springs through the blinds, lands in white stripes on the wall. The sun, fire in a window across the street, glitters furiously, this, its grand stand against the coming dark.

They pull her out legs first from the collapsed building, her high heels and ankles drip blood. Her clothes are torn, covered in splintered tile and glass. A medic tells her in Hebrew not to worry, she will be all right. He yells for a stretcher while she lies on her back, her face to stars that burn like fires from the exploded bomb. Someone brushes away the glass, grips her limp hand. She moves her head feebly from right to left, as if she’s reading some great text in the sky. She asks for her son, the medic promises to find him, tells her not to move. He asks people to stay with her, so someone squats there. Nearby them lies a man, his limbs gone. He looks like a bug on its back, a helpless Gregor Samsa. The woman on the ground is young—her hair thick, her face dark, She’s a Yemenite. When do we become accepted, part of a place? The woman wears one silver earring. The other ear is gone. Someone dabs her streaming eyes with a tissue, a white flag. People stare at the rubble around her, they watch medics load stretchers into ambulances. The medics remove more bodies. A stretcher comes for her, people lift her on. My son she says, as they take her away. No one moves. They sit, numb, with the burning sky as their blanket.