OUT OF DODGE
an excerpt

There are other people, though, who would understand perfectly the compulsion (need?) to dive right into the darkest tragedies if only to prove they can come out on the other side. The people who dress up in full war regalia to re-enact the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, the scientists who methodically scrape away millimeter after millimeter of hard lava to find fragile human figures, the divers who go down for the splintered remains of sunken ships. For them, I’d be willing to bet, part of the appeal of past catastrophes is what happened before. The Civil War reenactors daydream about the antebellum days of women in hoop-skirts on the vast porches of pretty plantations, the Pompeii people dream of the Roman Empire in full bloom, the shipwreck people imagine the gilded nights aboard the Titanic.

They would understand me: the people who dream of before and sort through the remains of after, the people who wonder Must the crash happen for the flight to matter? Jayce didn’t get it. She looked to the future. When things broke, she tried to fix them. She didn’t understand the quiet, guilty joy of sorting through the troubled shards of after.