I pant on the ground before him, my weakening fingers loosening around the skin. He stands in the field, still silent. I stare up at his throat which is long and thick, glinting in the light like a golden coin.

This is how love begins to end.

THE GROCERY STORE FLUORESCENTS around me. The packaging of each food is brighter than the last: light green bags wound around bread, bright blue plastic shrouding cookies, vibrant red plastic trapping the body of a cake.

I fill my cart slowly: Meat, eggs, spinach. In the dairy section, the lights get more dazzling, disorienting me.

I’m grasping the handle of a gallon of milk when it happens: The knot seizes, tightens, and pain tears through my body. It radiates out through my limbs, a hell fire in the veins, an eruption that levels me, my mind going blank from the ache.

I COME TO ON THE GROUND. I PART MY eyes, and everything is cool and wet. My knot still hurts, a leftover shiver from the explosion.

“You OK?” asks a man.

I hear him before I see him, before he slides his head into my line of sight. The lights of the grocery store make a saint of his face.

“OK?” I ask.

“Well, you dropped like a shitload of meat all over,” he says. “And now you got milk everywhere.”

I lift my throbbing head off of the ground and I can feel it — the milk is in my hair, on the back of my neck, on my hands and wrists, a drenching.

“Here, let me help.”

He grasps my hand and hauls me up. My body is trembling, wet as if I have just been birthed, milky calf.

“That’s it, there you are, just fine,” he says. “Do you want me to call a doctor?”

Here comes the sugar water, here comes the sugar water.

“No,” I say. “I’m fine.”

A grocery store employee walks by and his eyes widen.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he says, pulling a walkie-talkie from his green vest. “Clean up in the dairy aisle, I repeat, clean up in the dairy aisle.”

I WALK HOME SLOWLY, WITH MY THREE groceries. I can’t carry more than that. My knot still aches. Home, I unlock the door, crawl into bed, dried milk on my skin, clothes, in my hair, flaking down onto my sheets like snow.

THE NEXT MORNING, I PICK UP THE DAY’S newspaper from the stand on the way to work. The cover story:

82 DEAD IN BOMB STRIKE

At 7:32PM local time today, our Forces conducted a strike against a foreign country determined to do our country harm. As part of an ongoing effort to contain these attacks against our freedoms, our country dropped a GSU-78 bomb from an aircraft.

We took every precaution to avoid civilian casualties with this strike. There are 82 confirmed dead at the time of press.