Stephen Markley - Ohio

When she opened them, Marty Brinklan was standing over her. He took off the handcuffs and sat with her in the back of another ambulance while a paramedic shone a light in her eyes. When the medic finished looking her over, Mr. Brinklan asked her if she was okay.

“My head hurts,” she said. He still had a thick white mustache and kind, silent eyes. His face was ancient and weary. Gray tufts of hair protruded from the wide nostrils of his battered nose.

“Tina, you need to tell me what happened here.”

She said nothing.

“I’m Marty. I know your folks from growing up. You knew my son.”

She sat silently, not knowing what to say. In the distance, she could hear the rumble of thunder. She wanted only to pass into an entombed, dreamless sleep.

He said, “You know they called me out here, Tina, because you said you hurt somebody. We found a little bit of blood in your car. How did it get there?”

She watched the leaves of a nearby sycamore turning over, blown by a furious wind.

“Who was with you? Stacey said she saw you leave a bar with someone.”

She said nothing. To even think his name spread inexhaustible dread through the veins of her arms.

“Where is this person? You said you left him in the woods? Is he hurt?”

She said nothing.

“Why were you out here?”

Stacey coming along when she did was her last necessary evidence for the presence of God in all things. He had seen Tina on this road tonight, and He had tested her, she was sure. She had failed the test.

“Tina, there’s a storm on the way. If there’s someone in the woods, and they’re hurt, we need to find them. Right away. Now.”

She looked over his shoulder and took in the view. This part of Stillwater rose along the crest of a hill before dropping back down into the woods. From this vantage point the lights of New Canaan glowed, the town nestled into a broad, shallow valley. The way the sky dropped down on the horizon made it feel like they were in one of those planetarium theaters. Not just stars overhead but almost a dome. From the west, the thunderclouds drifted steadily closer. She could see the glowing bursts of lightning in them. How unsettling it was that they all lived out their lives—every triumph and sorrow—confined to this same sliver of God’s creation. That they pinballed around one another until someone was dead or born.

“I left him in the woods,” she said. “We were in love.”

The wind blew harder, a staggering blast of air raking across the fields, shrieking like the sharpening of knives and scattering hair into her face. With it came the smell of fire, the acrid scent of char and carbon that tingles the nose. A thunderstorm swept in. Lightning split the night, and the downpour roared, accompanied by the frequent mortar fire of thunder. Rain like shards of glass streaking out of the sky. They took her away. Not that it mattered. Never again would she sleep through a night and not feel the sunburn heat of the fire. A recurring dream, month after month, year after year, always the same raging fire blasting through the fields and towns and forests, searing the night, swallowing the known world, as she struggled for a cool breath at the edge of the woods. The storm descended over the blue-black nighttime hills, threading through her, savage and beautiful, settling in her heart, her home.

ON A BLUSTERY AUTUMN DAY with leaves scraping across the parking lot of the Masjid Al-Amin Mosque in Columbus, just north of Ohio State University in the affluent suburb of Upper Arlington, two men sat parked in a 2003 Dodge RAM pickup. In the cab they had an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle, a TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol, and a cheap CZ-82 handgun as well as roughly two hundred rounds of ammunition between the three weapons. Their compatriot, who’d arrived in another vehicle and parked at a nearby strip mall, had entered the mosque early Friday morning before worshipers arrived. He carried in a backpack an explosive device built around a block of Semtex-10, which he placed in the women’s bathroom. Though security cameras captured his image, this did not stop the device from detonating at ten to two, just as morning services were about to get under way.

The plan was for the explosion to send people running to the front exit where, as they spilled out, they would be caught in a pincer movement line of fire. In the minds of the perpetrators this would serve as a warning to the religious group they saw as most responsible for the troubles of their homeland. Like many young men convinced of their cause but with only vague notions of how the murder of innocent people will advance the interests of their tribe, they had no particular end game in mind, only to rack up as many kills as possible. In their fantasies, they saw it sparking the final crusade, the war for the heart of their nation, in which those with white skin would finally band together and push out all invading faiths and bloodlines.

Instead, when the man in the driver’s seat saw the first people pour out, he found he couldn’t leave the truck. He saw an old man, blood streaming down his head into a massive Rorschach inkblot on his cream shirt, carrying a young girl with most of her face gone. People and smoke followed behind him, including the girl’s father, who was stripping off his shirt to tear into a tourniquet, his shaky hands struggling with tough Brooks Brothers fabric. The driver, Amos Flood, had the assault rifle on his lap, but he never even picked it up. He started blubbering, tears pouring down his fleshy pink face. The little girl just looked too much like a little girl. After a moment, his brother said, “Let’s go,” and Amos started the car and drove them back home to their farm in New Canaan, Ohio, a little over an hour north.

Three people were seriously injured in the blast and one killed. The injured included the old man, Ali Usman, who lost part of his left hand and received treatment for second-degree burns. He’d run into the fire to pull out the child. The girl, who’d been in the bathroom at the time eating a chocolate bar stolen from her mother’s purse, died in the parking lot. Her name was Maisha Rizvi. She was ten years old and a star student in Mrs. Paul-Heen’s fifth-grade class at Barrington Road Elementary School in Upper Arlington. Her father was the head of the multimedia department for the Triple-A minor league baseball team the Columbus Clippers. Because they had season tickets, Maisha was a die-hard Clippers fan, knew the names of every player and their stat lines as far into the weeds as on-base percentage. She developed fierce crushes, depending on who was playing well, and if those crushes moved up to the major leagues, she would follow their careers with fervent, desperate hope. A highlight of her short life came when her father arranged a pregame tour of the clubhouse where she met all the players and gathered each of their signatures on a baseball. Dante Orillio, a stout first baseman from the Bronx, carrying a not-unwarranted grudge that the Indians had sent him back down, took the ball from her, and noted the headscarf she’d taken to wearing (as if it could more quickly usher in puberty and therefore adulthood and therefore independence). As he signed his name, he said, “Assalamu alaikum, sister.”

She could barely breathe back “Wa alaikum salaam,” and after the game, she used an advance on her allowance, begged and pleaded from her father, to buy an Orillio poster, which she kissed on the mouth each night before she went to sleep. Her mother objected to the poster, and they fought bitterly over its appropriateness. This was seven weeks before she saw the chocolate in her mom’s purse and—a streak of preteen rebelliousness already blooming—decided she’d rather eat it in the bathroom than sit through the first part of services.