Weekend Freewrite -1/18/2020 - Single Prompt Option: Night Shift
The Friday that the Lofton County Free Voice released the information about the 12,000 un-counted Black and Latino victims of the Ridgeline Fire was the day, in Captain H.F. Lee's mind, that all of Lofton County joined him on the night shift of the mind.
The news hit Big Loft like a bomb – 12,000 people, just gone. They had been gone, of course, but to recognize the loss of that many people – that many workers, with the holidays coming up – that many families, soon to be in need of financial assistance and drawing the city's resources – that much loss of life, when those not in the Black and Latino communities thought that as bad as the Ridgeline Fire was, the city had dodged a bullet – the news hit like a bomb.
The night shift of the mind … the way people's thinking and feeling changed forever after a great trauma … Big Loft looked and felt much like Captain H.F. Lee of the Big Loft police felt many days after a lifetime struggle with depression, compounded by PTSD-inducing experiences before and during his two decades of Army service.
This day was as exceptionally bad for Captain Lee as it was for Big Loft. He was head of the cold case division, but also interim division commander for the Blue Ridge precinct that had messed up the count of the dead – not serving in that capacity until the station house that had fallen off the foundation was replaced, but still, the duty was his.
So, he had to read those 12,000 names … but he couldn't! The whole thought triggered the terrible memories of lists he had to read as an army commander and send letters home … and among them was a list very like those uncounted save by the Lofton County Free Voice, each attached to a family and a story of anguish and grief the powers that be would have preferred to stifle … just as they would have preferred to stifle the survivors of Five Bright Nine …
Colonel H.F. Lee, Army Reserve, former commander of Special Forces Unit 6, had been one of the survivors, had gone to the night shift almost permanently after Five Bright Nine … but the powers that be had not recognized: he had gone to work graveyard over their future careers! It had started with that list, a list multiplied thousands of times to him when looking at the list of the rest of the dead in the Ridgeline Fire.
But, it was Friday … what Colonel Lee in his capacity as police captain absolutely could not do did not need to be done that day, at least. So, he folded the Free Voice, put it in his desk, and drove away from it at exactly 5:00pm.
Photo by Sander Dewerte on Unsplash