If you had bought only organic milk, you wouldn’t have been able to afford the trip, but on the trip you felt pangs of guilt when you looked at Alex, your nine-year-old, whose breasts you could see budding through her swimsuit. Maybe, just maybe, all that highly processed milk was making her hormones kick in prematurely, and what have I done, you think, and now, with all this about the killer, you feel even more often that the earth is sucking you in from below, and if it weren’t for being able to think about Paul instead or the handles on the chair you are sitting in while eating your raisin bran, you’d be all the way sucked in, the image of your brother with his blood running out of his head feeding the vortex, providing the extra whoosh that would make your journey to the center of the earth entirely possible. Driving to practice, the road is gleaming from an overnight shower, but the sun is lighting up the blacktop in a promising warm glow as you pass by a man who opens his mailbox and hands his newspaper to his collie, who takes the newspaper gingerly in his mouth, and with his tail high trots back toward the house.
