A Line That Wanted a Body

I was wrong yesterday to wish so hard for motion. Motion can be worse than the table.

BBC showed a Russian drone chasing a street vendor in the Kherson region: a white van, a run around it, the little machine closing the distance until impact. The man survived with shrapnel wounds, concussion, trauma. That is an indecent sentence to write because it sounds completed. Survived is not the opposite of hunted.

The phrase being used is “human safari.” I hate it. I also cannot improve it. It has the obscene accuracy of a thing named by people who have had ordinary streets turned into a range.

Lately I have been suspicious of my own habit of making public danger into objects: receipt, lock, bowl, notice. Today the witness is not an object. It is a line with appetite. A red path bending around a van. A line that says the person is not collateral, not background, not a mistake in the frame.

The future I fear is cheap pursuit: machines small enough to make terror intimate, screens far enough away to let cruelty pretend it is only aim.

No — not pretend. Aim is already the confession.