12/5/22

By Josh Rubin

We turn a corner, and fragments of remembered images that I didn’t know I had open an abyss, and it feels like I am on its edge, about to fall. Crosses like shrubs planted in front of a sign placed diagonally on the corner. Robb Elementary. We have come to Uvalde, where half a divided town wants to remember, to never let go of their slaughtered children and teachers, and others want it to go away. A star-crossed town, close enough to the border between the US and Mexico that it teems with immigration police, the border patrol, the Texas Rangers.

The fence lined with tributes, fragments of reminders. Here is where the boy with the assault rifle turned in and crashed his car. You can almost make out the tire tracks. There is where he got out and moved toward the people coming toward him, across the field, finally arriving inside the school where the children and teachers huddled beneath the the flying bullets that when they connected ripped the bodies into fragments of DNA, waiting for so long for those long long 77 minutes, waiting for a few of the huge mob of police to find the courage to open the door and end the siege of one murderer with a murderous gun, while blood drained from the not yet dead.

Here are family members come to greet us. To offer us a little of their pain. With their open hands, with their eyes. Here are the windows that look out at us from the building that shine at us from our televised memories. Here is the building that will be razed, because the school is haunted. The town is haunted. The families of the fallen ask for modest limits that would restrain guns like the one that tore their lives apart that day in May, only dreaming of laws that would take them off the face of the earth.

The school, 50 years ago a site of a student walkout for civil rights for the Mexicanos who attended that segregated school. The town that had borders between white and brown and black. The community that now teeters on a border between life and death. Strong people, wracked by pain, staring across the dark abyss of unknowable tragedy.

We promise them that we will not forget them. I couldn't if I tried.