The street looks ordinary, the kind you drive without thinking about it, with snow-darkened curbs and a thin film of winter grit and brake lights sewing the evening together, until doors suddenly swing wide and masked men spill out in black jackets, radios clicking like nervous insects, heavy soles striking pavement with the practiced sound of authority, and a woman is still sitting behind the wheel telling them she's on her way to the doctor, telling them she's disabled, her voice already worn by a body that's spent too much of its life fighting itself, when the car shudders, a pane of glass collapses inward, shards scattering across the dashboard, and hands plunge into her hair as her head snaps back and she's torn from the driver's seat into the cold as if the vehicle itself has betrayed her.

Somewhere else, under the washed-out glow of parking-lot lights, a teenage boy in a red vest is crushed against asphalt while he says he's a citizen, that he has a passport, that he's only seventeen and just at work, and in Minnesota a mother has already been shot and buried, leaving behind children and a city still hollowed by grief, schools quiet but not numb, neighborhoods awake and watching, people standing along their front steps and texting one another not to go out, not because they're indifferent but because the air itself feels unsafe.

Fear moves the way weather does, sliding across state lines, slipping through open windows and into living rooms where children bend over homework while their parents pretend not to hear sirens, and it moves because nothing's stopped it yet, because the men doing this keep being told, again and again, that no one's going to make them stop.

A windshield caves in, a teenager's forced down, a woman's hauled into open air by her hair, and uniforms and masks and weapons begin to feel fused together, no longer signaling protection but something closer to menace, the arrival of a force that doesn't pause to explain itself and doesn't need to, because it moves with the confidence of impunity, backed by the weight of the state.

. . .

Enough to make anyone imagine it: their son in that vest, their mother in that driver’s seat, their own block filled with radios and armored feet and the brittle sound of windows giving way, until there's nowhere left to hide from the question burning in the air, asking whether this is what was wanted, whether this is what was chosen, whether this is the country anyone meant to make, and pressing on all of us, as witnesses and neighbors and human beings, to look, to see it, to see them, to see all of it, and to refuse, with everything we have left, to look away again.