"Any man among us has seen so many die over the years, the wave after wave of death sweeping in like..."

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Any man among us has seen so many die over the years, the wave after wave of death sweeping in like a tide that strikes all, haphazard. The good, the bad, the virgin and the harlot: no one is spared, all go rose-spattered with plague lesions, and there is no sense, no judgment before doom strikes.

Death takes us all with the black malady or the sweating sickness or the white blindness or the winter croup, crops failing or bitter water in our mouths.

There is no justice to such deaths, and there is no sense.

But this fire – the flames that burned our boys – these few deaths were an act of malevolence. Someone intended this, there was a judgment made, an evil act. And in this, it is for sure and certain that there is a soul at fault. Someone can be blamed, if not for all the deaths that have been visited upon us, then for these deaths as a synecdoche for all that came before.

I will move heaven and earth to hold onto one thing that makes sense now, the few victims who can be atoned, the one tragedy that can be redeemed.

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- Sinful Folk, by Ned Hayes (forthcoming 2012)