These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live… or to go into the darkness. We must either love each other, or we must die.*

Slowly now, with decreasing frequency, her remaining nerve cells fire and send the weak electrochemical message down the length of the fiber across synaptic junctions to the outreached dendritic ends of the neighbor cells. More often than not the message doesn’t transfer. All the functions of the body have shut down one by one until there is almost nothing left that works.

Allison and her mother were standing in line at the summer camp’s registration table, in line with other parents and children, in various amounts of ‘scout’ uniforms with their respective groups. Allison, in her mother’s womb, had been sliced in half by a piece of the shattered plate glass front window.

John and Tiny Jim were there, too, in starched shirts and freshly laundered shorts, for a second, and in the next second they were gone. Everything went in the blink of an eye during the approach of the blast. The invisible supersonic pressure wave in front of the blast flattened the trees and snapped them off at ground level, the building they were in had lifted off its foundations, disintegrated against the pressure wave and dissolved into the churning mass of pieces accelerating outward.

The blast had killed John and Tiny Jim immediately.

Daisy had gone downstairs to pee, didn’t know the building had lifted from over her head, had not known when the pressure wave arrived, had not known when the blast wave, the sonic boom, flattened her where she sat, compressing her into the bowl.

Her heart stopped, her lungs burst like a balloon, her insides squeezed out and down the waste drain.

Daisy’s neurons tried to communicate with their nerve system neighbors, but no one was listening.

Like the dying sparkles from Fourth of July fireworks, the little inaudible snap and crackle of firing nerves slowed, flickered, went dark.

* Lyndon Johnson in his famous ‘Daisy Commercial’ that ran one time in the 1964 presidential race against Goldwater.

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