Free Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood

man’s face is still convulsed with grief, they are as tender with him as if he were a child.
You know they’re giving out tents downtown, don’t you? And camp beds and cookstoves, milk and bread?
If the man nods, they’ll ask,
How many beds you need?
as a way of inquiring how many of his family were taken by the storm.
    Until the looting started, no one thought of needing deputies. The first cases defied belief in most of the people who heard of them, and in their disbelief they repeated the stories until they began to take the shape of storm lore.
    Taking the rings off corpses, I heard. Going along from porch to porch where the bodies were laid out and yanking the rings right off their fingers.
    I heard there was a stranger coming through and cutting off fingers to get the rings. Heard he got himself shot.
    The men wander the streets each night, their own at first and then the surrounding blocks. They marvel at the houses pushed over sideways, the houses without roofs, the holes in the ground that are just the wound of a basement, ripped open and full of junk. Here, concrete steps and a metal railing leading nowhere; there, someone’s yard with the grass entirely gone and an old tree torn clean in two. Sometimes they see folks with cameras, taking pictures of kids in front of ruined houses.
    Just stand there a minute. No, you can’t go climbing up, it’s just a pile of sticks, it’s not safe.
    At first it’s just town folks, taking pictures of their own places to send to relatives. The men understand that this is born of the need to witness and record the devastation. Pictures like these will be sent in letters to relatives in other states; they will be put into albums to show to grandchildren in years to come. But now it’s folks from out of town coming in their clean clothes and their polished cars, gawking and taking snapshots of their children like they’re standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The men walk past, shaking their heads, and some of them mutter their dissent loud enough to be heard.
We ain’t a sideshow, you know.
    A man who has been in a stupor since the storm will see a family of tourists perched on a ruin, children posing for their father’s camera, and his breathing will fall into shallow stabs, and his hands will shape themselves into loose fists as he glowers his defiance at the father. He will mutter something and clench his jaw, and then mutter it louder until he is shouting
You got no right!
and other men passing will take his arms and pull him away with them, speaking to him in the low, confidential tones of a parent calming an angry child.
    When it falls dark each night, the men gather around fires they light in the middle of the streets from the downed branches and debris all around them. News can be had here, stories exchanged, and a man can warm himself while talking to his neighbors. A man deep in mourning is welcome the same as a man who is only angry. Here the grieving man is not expected to meet his neighbors’ eyes. He can bring his face out of the shadows into the orange-yellow light knowing that he’ll be allowed to stare into the fire alongside the others and unburden himself of his sorrow or not, as he chooses. It may be that some of the other men were there when the grieving man failed to find his children alive. It may be that the other men’s hands are also torn from ripping at the beams and crumbled bricks of the school, and dragging out the bodies of the children.
    These other men will understand when the grieving man says,
I keep seeing them, whole, when I sleep
. And when he says,
I see them, smiling, walking to me out of a ruin,
they will nod their heads deeply, having seen it, too.
    Mostly the men around these fires want to detach themselves from their losses by talking about those worse off than themselves. Standing in the glare of the fire, they don’t see the wreckage illuminated behind them.
I heard as