Daylight breaks through the trees in
Highlands Cemetery, on the eastern outskirts of Ottawa, Kansas, at exactly 6:52
AM. Tombstones cast long shadows toward the west, almost as if pointing to
lawless towns of history, like those trampled by Quantrill’s Raiders in the
aftermath of America’s Civil War, veterans of which lie beneath the Highlands Bermuda
grass, their names slowly being erased by lichens, rain, and blowing dust.
Rebecca Stitcher’s gravestone casts no shadow. Nor does her mother Isabelle’s.
Both are rectangular pieces of granite, lying flat as Kansas itself, with names
carved into the mottled red igneous rock, almost like shallow streams spelling
out their histories of interactions with the prairie storms. The grass has
still not established completely over the women’s graves. A dark gray cloud
bank blends in with the western horizon. Two miles way, the one remaining
Stitcher, Naomi, Rebecca’s sister, lies in her bed, staring at the ceiling, her
left arm down along her side under the covers, her right arm bent, her right
hand holding a semi-automatic pistol, a .45 caliber Glock 21, lying across her
chest.
She raises the pistol, pointing at the
ceiling light—a pink, fluted, upside-down glass shade held with a brass
knob—and pulls the trigger. She pulls her left hand out from under the covers,
works the slide, and pulls the trigger again. She’d learned how to do that from
watching crime shows on television. Over and over, she dry fires, practicing
her trigger pressure exactly as she read online that she was supposed to do. In
her mind the pink glass shade is someone’s face. She doesn’t know who that
person is, but it’s the person who killed her sister. Naomi imagines the face.
She aims at the right eye and pulls the trigger. She hears the clink but in her
mind it’s really a bam!
