Status Updates From An Ordinary Violence

“What was so confounding about the fact of an ordinary man’s violence? So many people needed monsters to look monstrous. They couldn’t accept, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the demons looked just like them. That a seemingly regular life could conceal a deeply vicious soul.” (57)

“If he was remembered at all, the man would quickly become something other than a man. A beast, a monster, a devil, but the names would all mean the same thing—not human. Not just not like us, but not of us. In other words: not our problem. An abhorrent anomaly that couldn’t have been foreseen. Unfixable, so why bother trying? Best not to look at it too closely.”