I am playing badminton in the park when the police cars drive by, five and then five, sirens loud and bright lights blaring; they roar past, disappear, and one ambulance comes behind, crawling by comparison, and I know where they were all going and why, and my neighbors do as well, and we barely acknowledge it, the honesty hanging close about our heads until another police car goes past and someone cracks a joke—pointing at one of us, saying, “Here he is, officer!”—and we laugh and I tell myself you are safe from the gunman, that you work in a different office, and I do not let myself think about how terribly familiar this all feels, like when there was the shooting in Midtown and I was in a building a mile away and somebody on a Zoom call asked if I was “OK” and I said yes, a half-truth, and we carried on as if nothing was wrong, when really I would find out later that a friend’s boss had been shot as she went to a doctor’s appointment to make sure she did not have cancer, and after that nothing changed and everything was the same as before, and now here, in the park, as the sun sets and chimney swifts flutter chittering above my head, their small bodies so strong and full of life, I know again the cold adolescence of my country, the things we love—our guns, and the men who carry them.
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Zack Fox Loehle received his M.A. from Kennesaw State University. His writing appears in Catamaran, The Cincinnati Review, The Los Angeles Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Mental Floss, and elsewhere. “500 Rounds” was a finalist for the 2025 Forge Flash Nonfiction Competition.