Several fire engines swept into the flaming field. K. forced himself to look at the mess, but his eyes refused to compute the familiar objects and features.

Two white spots, an elbow-like crook, brackets, plastic shelves, chairs, clothes, bits and pieces—he strained his eyes and focused, grasping for focus. It was all a blur. But K. would not give up. He ran his palms over his eyes, pressed down on his eyeballs, and looked again. The white patches turned into T-shirts on headless torsos, two identically dressed people; a man and a woman. The T-shirts read: I (heart) Amsterdam. Another body nearby; a flattened head, a severed hand, plastic, metal, an open suitcase, a torn-off leg, everything crumpled and fused.

He slowly paced around the piles of wreckage, carefully watching his step so as not to tread on the bodies. He got tangled in wires, tripped over an open suitcase, trod on a boarding pass. He picked it up: Economy. Mrs. Ivonna Ray. Frequent flyer. Why the sixteenth, Mrs. Ray? An appointment? Work? Someone you don’t know booked tickets for the fifteenth? Why this airline? Was that a travel agent’s tip? Skyscanner? Or did you only dream of boarding this plane, Mrs. Ray? Where are you now? Which of these shapeless objects were you? He dropped the boarding pass back into the grass. He looked around, and the more he looked, the more bodies he saw. The black star had fallen and crumbled in the air into huge pieces of skin, torn metal, and people. Suitcases crashed open and from them pieces of life fell like rain, shapeless and indistinct, as if torn through by memories or a sick fantasy.

K. walked aimlessly from one disfigured body to another. Holding his breath, he walked past seats holding two bloodless children flattened by the pressure. Their necks were snapped. They still had their seat belts on. The world around him floated, like hot air shimmering above a road on a summer afternoon. K.’s forehead, neck and back beaded with sweat. His eyes flickered in a desperate search for something alive, but everything was deathly still. The gusts of wind rolling over the green grass and white wildflowers only underscored the stillness. K.’s gaze finally landed on something bright. He sat down and parted the grass: the wind stirred the shiny, yellow-green feathers of a dead parakeet spread out on the ground. Its eyes black as small buttons looked up at the sky.

The disparate tendrils of black smoke reached for the heavens.

K. stood up and walked back towards the burning field; the epicentre of the catastrophe. There were fewer bodies, but there was a strong, sharp stench of burning fuel, plastic, and something else familiar. Flesh. The smell of the freshly slaughtered. Freshly scythed grass. Unlike anything else; the eternal companion of killers and their victims.