30 July 2006 | Vol. 6, No. 2

Two Halves: Elegy for One Summer's Dawn

Bellefontaine: a town on the way to somewhere else, a place

where you run out of gas, stop to make love on a picnic table


somewhere by the wheat field—when, toward magic hour, the boy

already loaded the gun, the smell of bacon wafting outside


his grandparents house, where he went to make their deaths real.

The news always first: yellow tape stretched over dirt roads,


clean white houses, the scarred fields and blood spackling the earth.

Now the shouldered camera, microphone shoved toward the mouth


of the sheriff: he can't deal with this, but gives them what

he knows: t