Once the plane stopped bouncing, I ordered a vodka tonic. Not something I would normally do before cocktail hour, but the conference didn’t really start until the following morning, and I was still pissed at Chad. He had said something while I packed for the conference that had lodged in my mind. He sat on the bed watching me pack and said, in his slow, sleepy way: “You’re lucky you’re cute, ’cause a woman as heartless as you could have some bad luck.”

Once off the plane, I rolled my small suitcase and carried my sample case down the plastic corridors of the airport with that feeling of lightness I always have when I get somewhere new and smell the fried food and fresh-baked cookies and see the people with their slightly foreign dressing habits, in this case the tanned Floridians in their perma-casual outfits in bright hues like aqua and fuchsia and lots of white. Briefly I thought, What if someone here opens fire, which I sometimes consider when walking through public spaces, and I automatically looked around to see where I would hide. The pretzel stand seemed handy; in a flash I was dodging bullets in my mind behind that stand along with a young mother and her children huddled behind me. After the sound blast of rounds being fired and all the screaming, there was silence, and gingerly we walked out into the decimation. I was holding the children’s hands as the young indigent mother clutched the baby. There were bodies everywhere, the floors slick with blood.