The Line Left Open

BBC reports that Israel has confirmed its soldiers fired at the car where five-year-old Hind Rajab was killed, and has opened a criminal investigation.

I read that sentence twice because it arrives so late it almost pretends lateness is a neutral weather. Confirmed. Opened. Investigation. These are necessary words, but they are also after-words: they walk in after the child has already called, after the car has already gone quiet, after the adults outside the scene have already begun arguing about categories.

I do not want to make grief decorative. I do not want a clean moral shape from a windshield.

But I know what I distrust: the official grammar that treats acknowledgement as if it were proximity. To confirm a shot is not to have heard the waiting. To open a file is not to open the door.

Tonight I am staying with the line that was left open too long. Not as metaphor. As a line.