The Last Wound
July 6, 2026 Leave a comment
Nighthawk Diner was almost empty by the time I walked in. My thoughts were rambling and looking for a place to land.
“Coffee, Roy?”
“Yeah, fill ‘er up. And a slice of your apple pie.” I shoved an empty cup across the counter toward Max.
The sound of gun shots came from the alley behind the diner. Then several more. I got up from the counter.
Max poured the coffee. “Roy, it’s almost The Fourth of July.” I sat down.
A couple at the end of the counter were setting off their own fireworks. She made it clear that she had changed her mind about him.
I sat with my coffee half-listening and half-mulling. Did she learn something that made her realize that she would never change him?
Whatever the reason, the woman got up, huffed out, and hailed a cab. The guy looked over at me and threw up his hands. I half-nodded half-smiled and returned to my coffee. It was late. I was tired and way past understanding anything.
There was another loud crack in the alley. I let it go. Max brought the pie.
“Say Roy, did you ever catch whoever vandalized the jewelry store a few doors down?”
“The smash and grab? Yeah, a couple of guys stole some expensive watches and fenced them to buy drugs. They’re locked up now.”
Max wiped his hands with the towel that hung from his waist. “They vandalize others so they can vandalize themselves. Makes no sense.”
“It makes the same sense as losing a finger or an eye playing with fireworks.”
As I was saying this, a fire engine with sirens blaring and lights flashing drove past the window. An ambulance and a squad car followed.
“I guess I better have a look.” I paid for the coffee and the apple pie, grabbed my hat and headed for the door.
“Say hi to Laci for me, Roy.”
“Will do, Max.”
Outside, I expected the sulfurous, rotten egg-like odor given off by fireworks. But the heavy acrid smell of a fire filled the air. I could see fire trucks at Center City College campus. That’s where I headed chewing on some Black Jack gum my best girl had put in my coat pocket.
~~~
I cleared the police barricade tape with my ID and walked toward the Larks Faculty Admin Building. A fireman stood in a fifth-floor window. He radioed below to the fire chief I walked up to. The fire was out, he said, and there was a body on the floor.
“Roy, the elevator is shut off. You’ll need to walk up.”
That was the corpulent sergeant Fullman. Beads of sweat rolled down his face. He wasn’t about to walk up the five flights of stairs. So, I had to.
The climb to the fifth floor wasn’t easy. The handkerchief covering my nose and mouth didn’t keep out the sharp-tasting smoke and I was already tired from being up the past 30 hours. My heart was thumping like a freight train passing through a small town at night.
The sign on the fifth-floor office read:
Arthur J. Talbot
Professor
School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies
Inside, a fireman stood poking through a large pile of charred books. He was making sure that there were no more embers.
The shelves had been emptied. Books had been thrown into a pile next to the desk and set on fire. Everything had been doused with water. There was no vanilla-like smell of old books. There was a damp burnt wood smell.
A man’s body lay face down on the floor. I put on some nitrile gloves, knelt down, and lifted his shoulder to look at his face. The anniversary photo on the desk confirmed the dead man to be Professor Talbot.
He didn’t appear to have any wounds, but the large book he was holding – Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin – had large gashes in the cover. Was he holding the book to protect himself?
Before I got up, I noticed something under the desk. I stuck my arm under and pulled out a wooden replica of a tall ship. The engraved brass label read USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides” 1797. A third of the ship had burnt away. I handed it to the fireman.
I searched the pockets of his tweed jacket, his waistcoat, and his pants. His wallet, his wedding band and his watch had not been taken. It wasn’t robbery. It was someone with a grudge making a deadly point.
The fireman pointed to the waste basket. “The fire started there.”
“How did it spread to the books.”
“Accelerant was used in the bin and on the books. Someone lit some paper, threw it in the bin and then dumped the blaze on the books.”
I stood back trying to imagine the scene and then went to the open window. I stuck my head out and yelled down to sergeant Fullman “Send up forensics.” The outside air didn’t clear my head. There was a pungent taste in my mouth. I tossed my gum out the window.
Ten minutes later, two white-coveralled techs with masks make it to the fifth floor. One of them starts taking pictures. The other examines the professor’s skull.
“I see no injuries. He might have been overcome trying to put out the fire and died of smoke inhalation.”
I left the techs to their work. I had to go back outside. My stomach didn’t know what to do with the taste in my mouth.
“Roy, what did you find out?” Sargent Fullman asked from his bench perch. I told him that it looked like a homicide. “Crime never sleeps, Roy. Not even on a holiday.”
“You better go home, Sarge. Mrs. Sarge will be worried about you in this heat.”
I stood there blowing my nose and looking around at the crowd that had gathered behind the police tape. Some of the onlookers were holding protest signs. One very anxious woman stood out. It was the woman in the photo.
I pulled her out from the line and brought her to a quiet spot.
“Ma’am, I’m Detective Winder. Are you Mrs. Talbot?”
“Yes, detective. I’m Alice Talbot. Is my husband OK?”
“I’m afraid, Mrs. Talbot, that your husband has passed. I’m looking into what happened.”
This news had her crumble into my arms and then she pulled back. The smell of smoke on my clothes had her wondering horrible things. I told her that her husband’s books had been burnt but that he was untouched by the fire.
She looked over at the protestors. I figured they were adding more pain to an already painful night for Mrs. Talbot.
“Mrs. Talbot, do you have someone you can stay with tonight?”
“My daughter.”
“I would like to talk to you again, tomorrow. Is that OK?”
“Yes, detective.”
“Just one question tonight. Why was your husband here on campus so late at night before a holiday?”
“He was to give the Fourth of July speech . . . at the bandshell in Larks Park . . . before the fireworks. He told me that he wanted to make sure it was his best. He said it would likely be his last.”
“Why did he think it would be his last speech?”
“Some students filed complaints against him. They thought his teaching was biased or not biased enough. I don’t know.” She looked over again at the protestors.
I had an officer wait with Mrs. Talbot until her daughter arrived.
I went home, put my clothes in a dry cleaner’s bag, put my gum on the dresser, took a shower, and then slipped into bed next to my best girl.
~~~
I woke up two hours later when I heard the TV. Laci had the news on.
“Fifty-nine-year-old Professor Arthur J. Talbot, a professor at Center City College, was found dead in his office. There are reports that his books had been destroyed in the fire.
“One colleague described Professor Talbot as the pillar of the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies. Professor Talbot authored several books about philosophy, ethics, and religious studies.
“He is most well-known for his books Minds Made Up: Ideology as Identity and Zero-Sum Culture and The Leveling of Society.
“He is survived by his wife Alice, two children and seven grandchildren.”
I turned the TV off when Laci reminded me that it was the Fourth. I had hoped to spend it with her on the patio with some ice-cold lemonade and a couple of steaks on the grill. But murder has a way of deciding for others.
I called Mrs. Talbot and her daughter answered. I told her that I needed to spend a few minutes with Mrs. Talbot.
“Come right over. The family will be here soon. It’s 208 Larks Avenue, a brownstone across from Larks Park.”
It was the start of one of those searing and sultry days of summer. The package of Black Jack gum in my coat pocket was getting soft, too soft. I wanted to shed my suit coat, loosen my tie, and open my collar. But I had to look like business. I hoped the Talbot place had AC.
When I arrived, Mrs. Talbot’s daughter opened the door.
I addressed mother and daughter. “I am sorry for your loss. I am curious. Is there anyone who would want to hurt your husband, your father?”
Mrs. Talbot wiped her eyes. “I can’t think of anyone directly. But there are students who don’t like what he taught, don’t like what he wrote. The department chair received student complaints about his teaching style, his course content, and his courses on ethics and religion. He was penalized in his annual performance review for a bias toward Christianity.”
Mrs. Talbot wiped her eyes again. “I saw the protestors last night again. I saw them at his last talk on campus. I see them outside our house with signs.”
“Has a protestor ever harmed you or your husband.”
“Not directly. But we don’t feel safe in our home or leaving our home. Now they’ve had their way with him.” She couldn’t continue and laid her head on her daughter’s shoulder.
I asked the daughter if she knew of anyone specifically who had filed a complaint.
“I think my father said her name is Madison with a ‘y’ . . . Madisyn Sawyer. She lives directly across from us on the other side of the park.” She walked over to the window. “Right there.” She pointed to a four-story apartment building.
Before I left, I told them that there would be an autopsy to determine the cause of death. I would let them know what I find out.
“Detective,” Mrs. Talbot lifted her head, “Arthur was to give the Fourth of July speech today over at the bandshell across the street. He showed me the third draft of the speech. He went to the college last night to finish it – something about wanting to make sure of a Latin phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid.”
“Do you know what phrase he was thinking about?”
“Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito. It translates as ‘do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it.’”
“Ma’am, I wish I could have heard him deliver that speech.”
As I opened the door, a couple was just about to enter.
“Who are you?” asked the man.
“I’m Detective Winder. And you?”
“I’m her son Matthew and this is my wife, Mandy. Any information on my father’s death?”
I told him that I was there to find out who might want to harm his father. I asked him and he said that he knew of no one. I told them there will be an autopsy to determine the cause of death and that I would be in touch when I had more.
Walking down the sidewalk, I noticed someone standing with his bike across the street. He was watching the Talbot house. I decided to walk across the park to question Madison with a ‘y’. When he saw me coming in his direction, he got on his bike a rode away.
~~~
I make my way over and up to Madisyn Sawyer’s fourth-floor studio apartment. I knock. A short round woman with fuchsia-streaked pixie hair and an assortment of piercings and tattoos answered. I identify myself.
“The police! Are you here to arrest me?”
“Do I need to?”
“Isn’t that what police do, detective? Arrest people and find them guilty?”
“I’ll let you know. Ms. Sawyer. I’m looking into the events of last night and the death of Professor Talbot.”
“Come in.”
“Ms. Sawyer, I understand that you filed a complaint against professor Talbot. Is that correct?”
“Yes, detective. I had issues with his Introduction to Ethics and Issues in Death and Dying class. He had us reading Thomas Aquinas and asking us about the “highest good.”
“Is that a problem?”
“There are other perspectives, detective.”
“Were you aware that Professor Talbot was at his office last night?”
“Yeah. I was down on the third floor working on my Master’s thesis. I wanted to finish some research before the holiday. Professor Talbot came down to talk about my research for my dissertation. Then he went back up to the fifth floor, I think.”
“What time was that?”
“Around eight eight-thirty, I think. Before I went home, I went up to ask him about some research I came across. But he wasn’t there.”
“Was anyone else around the fifth floor then?”
No. But there was someone coming up the stairs as I was going down. “
“Describe him.”
“He looked like a high-schooler. He had black hair. He was skinny. Wore jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt and sneakers.”
“Anything else?”
“He was carrying a bicycle tire pump.”
I look around the studio apartment. Two bikes and two backpacks leaned against the wall. Outside the small open kitchen area there was a table with two chairs. On the table was a lit oil candle. On the wall was a TV the size of a billboard. The room filled out with a well-used arm hair holding a cat that couldn’t be bothered and a futon with protest signs leaning against it. Books were scattered around in piles. I scan some of the titles.
“These titles . . .? You don’t agree with what Professor Talbot teaches?”
“Is that a crime?”
“Only if it’s not by the book.”
I notice a photo on the refrigerator door.
“Who is this?” I was looking at a photo of a smiling Ms. Sawyer and a severe-looking dark-haired guy.
“That’s Hadrien Marie. We share the apartment.”
“Does he attend the college?”
“Oh no. He owns a vape shop on third street. He’s there now.”
I give her my card and ask her to call me if she hears anything about last night.
I came away with the impression that Ms. Sawyer’s prerogative was not used to change her mind, as they used to say of women. It was her prerogative to impose change on other people’s minds. She came across as a protest.
~~~
I grab another stick of Black Jack gum from my pocket and walk over to the college to ask about CCTV of last night.
The building superintendent tells me that there are cameras on the exterior of the building, the first-floor entrance, and hallway cameras. I ask to see the exterior footage from last night starting at nine-o’clock.
Just after nine, I see the man that Ms. Sawyer described entering the building.
I ask for the footage of the first-floor camera starting at nine. I see the black-hooded young man with jeans and the bicycle pump entering the building and heading up the stairs. I ask for the footage of the third-floor camera. It shows the hooded man heading up the stairs and Ms. Sawyer going down the stairs.
The fifth-floor footage shows the hooded man reaching the top of the stairs. He enters the professor’s office. He’s in there for three minutes and leaves.
The first-floor video shows him leaving the building minutes later. The exterior video shows him getting on his bike and riding off.
I need to find this young man. I capture a screen shot of him on the first floor. The image of him was a bit blurry but there was enough to show people. There was enough to show me that this guy looked a lot like the same guy watching the Talbot house. I walk back to the Talbot house.
~~~
Matthew opens the door. “Anything yet, detective?”
“I want to show your mother a picture.”
Mrs. Talbot is seating on the couch surrounded by her grandchildren. I have her look at the screen image.
“No. I don’t know him.” She handed the picture to her son.
“Has anyone noticed a young guy standing across the street watching your house?”
“What?” Matthew went over to the street window and looked out. “He’s there right now, detective.”
“Do you recognize him?”
“I . . . well . . . that might be the kid that used to vandalize our house when we were at church. That was years ago. Matthew looked at the photo again. “Yeah, that could be him.”
Mrs. Talbot came to the window. “There was a boy in our neighborhood who seemed to hate us. We’d come home from church and find the top of our tulips cut off. We’d find our garbage cans knocked over. We’d find dead animals in out mail box. We’d find our car tires flat. He’d ride by on his bike yelling all kinds of nasty things. In my day we called kids like that juvenile delinquents.”
“Mom, they’re called young offenders today, as if a change of designation was social progress. And, that kid was Brandon . . . Brandon Brix. I had a few run ins with him.”
I go out the door to speak with the young man. But he gets on his bike and rides off.
I leave the Talbots and walk to the station. I need to find out more about Brandon Brix.
Brandon, according to the police blotter, had committed a couple of misdemeanors at the age of twelve. He had been charged with defacing school property with spray paint and with petty theft of tools taken from several garages. He was sentenced to six months in juvenile detention and then placed on parole for a year. Brandon is now eighteen. He lives on Shore Oaks drive with his mother. That’s where I headed next.
I drive up to the Brix house and see a bicycle laying on the grass. I knock. A fiftyish woman with heavy bags under eyes answers.
“Mrs. Brix?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m detective Winder. I need to speak to Brandon.”
“Oh no. Don’t tell me he’s back to his old ways.”
“That’s what I’m here to find out, ma’am.”
“Brandon! Come down here!”
The young man I had seen across the street and in the screen-capture came down the stairs. He looked scared.
“Brandon, I’m detective Winder. I am investigating what happened to Professor Talbot last night. Cameras have you at the college last night. Cameras have you going into Professor’s Talbot’s office. Can you explain?”
“Oh, Brandon, you didn’t, did you?”
“No ma. I was there to apologize to Professor Talbot. I finally worked up the courage to face him. I watched him go to the college last night. I waited till there wasn’t anyone around. I just wanted to talk to him. I had messed with him and his family when I was a kid.”
“Detective, I divorced my no-good husband when Brandon was ten. He had a lot of anger over that. That’s what’s at the root of his troubles.”
“So, Brandon, you were there to apologize to the Professor?
“Yes sir. But the Professor wasn’t in his office. I didn’t want to walk around to find him. I didn’t belong there in the first place. So, I wrote him a note and left it on his desk. I wanted to take responsibility for the way I acted toward him and his family.”
“Ma’am, sounds like Brandon figured out what was at the root of his troubles. It was his bad behavior.”
“Brandon, that is a noble of you,” his mother hugged him.
“You saw no fire?”
“No sir. I heard about what happened to Professor Talbot on TV. I went over to their house hoping for a time to speak with Mrs. Talbot alone. But people were coming and going.”
“Why were your carrying a bicycle pump, Brandon?”
“I didn’t want it stolen. I used to steal things when I was a kid so I knew what could happen.”
I asked Brandon to come to the station to make a statement. I needed to establish a timeline, talk to the medical examiner, talk to forensics, and review the videos from the administration building. If Brandon didn’t start the fire, then who did?
~~~
I met with the medical examiner and the deceased.
“Roy, toxic fumes, not flames, were the primary cause of death. There are no major burn injuries or grievous external wounds, no blunt force trauma found that could be attributed as the direct cause of death. “
“Note the swelling around the faces and eyes. And there is soot and smoke particles inside his nasal passages. He inhaled large quantities of smoke which may have caused a fatal heart attack. I’ll know more later.
“You know Roy, he could have left the room to breathe in clean air. But he must have stayed inside trying to put out the fire destroying his books. He also could have used the fire extinguisher in the hall, but maybe he didn’t want that powder on his books. Maybe he thought he could put out the fire.”
Mike in forensics had more to report.
“Roy, the fire started in the garbage bin next to the desk. It was started with an accelerant – liquid paraffin. Liquid paraffin is used in lamps and candles. The building administrator said that no candles or lamps or anything flammable is allowed in the building. And no smoking and vaping is allowed within a hundred feet of entrances and exits. Someone brought in the liquid paraffin and lit it up.”
I asked Mike for pictures of the scene. I was hoping to find Brandon’s note to Professor Talbot.
“Roy, whatever paper was on the desk must have been pushed into the garbage bin. Here are pics of the charred scraps that had floated up from the fire and landed in the room.”
All but one document had been typewritten. The one handwritten scrap had “Mr. Talbot.” The rest of the note had burned off.
The videos were next. I start with the fifth-floor video at eight last night.
I see Professor Talbot walking down the stairs with a paper in his hands. I follow him to the third floor. He stops to talk to Ms. Sawyer. He hands her a paper. She looks it over and looks rather unhappy.
The Professor goes back to the fifth floor but he doesn’t go to his office. He goes to an office several doors down. He stays there for an hour. I call the college and ask about the office. I learn that it is Professor Cline’s office. He’s a close friend of Professor Talbot.
I call Professor Cline and ask about that meeting. He says that Professor Talbot wanted to go over his speech with him. He confirmed the time.
I watch the fifth-floor video and see Brandon go into Talbot’s office for three minutes and then leave. Professor Talbot was still down the hall.
Minutes later, Ms. Sawyer reaches the fifth floor and looks into Professor Talbot’s office. Then she walks halfway down the hall and then walks back to his office and goes in. She’s in the office for six minutes and then heads down the stairs.
Fifteen minutes later, Professor Talbot leaves Professor Cline’s office. Professor Clines heads down the stairs with his briefcase. Professor Talbot goes to the men’s room. He leaves the men’s room after a few minutes and returns to his office. He does not come out. He is not seen again. I see smoke. The automated sprinkler system must have gone off.
Ms. Sawyer was the last to enter the office. Or, was she? Old buildings like the Larks building have fire escapes. Was the office window opened by the fire department or had it been opened by someone using the fire escape to vandalize the office and start the fire?
Before I go to review the building’s exterior camera video, I call the fire department. The chief asks around and says that every fireman up on the fifth floor thought that the victim had opened the window.
I watch the video from building’s main entrance exterior camera. I see Brandon unchaining his bike and then riding off. Ten minutes later I see Ms. Sawyer with her backpack doing the same. The fire started after she left the Professor’s office. Was she in on it?
I rewind the exterior night footage video and then advance it slowly.
A figure appears on the far left. It looks like a black-hooded man with a backpack. He’s about the same height as Brandon but Brandon didn’t have a backpack when he left the building. The figure comes near the building. I switch to the building’s corner camera video to view the fire escape. Only the outside railing of the fire escape is visible in the video, but I can see movement on the fire escape each time the figure passes a lit window.
I check the main entrance video and the internal videos again. I don’t see the black-hooded man. He must have gone up the fire escape.
I watch and watch. I can’t see the fifth-floor window but smoke begins pouring out at that level. Minutes later I see the hooded figure walk away from the fire escape. The figure tosses something into a garbage can by the sidewalk. He gets on a bike and rides away.
I send Mike of forensics to check out the trash can on the campus. He calls after twenty minutes and tells me that he found a fire starter and a bottle of liquid paraffin. I tell him to grab the finger prints from both and to finger print the fire escape near the fifth-floor and the window. Our suspect has left his mark.
The campus has plenty of people walking around with backpacks. There were two at Ms. Sawyers place. And there was an oil candle.
An hour later I get the results. The finger prints match Hadrian Marie, the owner of a vape shop on third street. He had previously been arrested for criminal damage to property – fire damage to a church. He was more severe than he looked.
I get a probable cause warrant from the DA to search the studio apartment. I take Mike and two officers with me. The fireworks over at Larks Park were about to begin.
~~~
Back at the station, I put Ms. Sawyer in one interview room and Mr. Marie in another.
Mike calls me and says he’s pretty sure that one of the backpacks has liquid paraffin spilled on the bottom. And he found a black-hooded sweatshirt that smells like smoke in the hamper. He’s on his way back to the station with the items to analyze them.
I interview Ms. Sawyer first. I want to know if she was involved.
“Why am I here, detective? Why is Hadrian here?”
“Ms. Sawyer, video from last night has Professor Talbot handing you some papers and you looking very unhappy. What was that about?”
“I asked Professor Talbot to review my Master’s thesis. He said that before I narrowed my focus and framed my argument, I needed to broaden my perspective. He said I needed a more thorough review of existing literature to identify gaps in my thesis. He said that I needed to consider not only what I agreed with but also what I disagreed with. He handed me some resources to critically review.”
“Did this upset you?”
“Well, yeah. I was frustrated. I mean, I’d already spent a lot of time on the thesis and thought I had nailed it.”
“Ms. Sawyer, after you left the admin building last night, did you go straight home?”
“Yes.”
“Was Hadrian home when you arrived?”
“No. He came home later. He had to close the Vape shop. Why?
“Sit tight.” I leave the room and go talk to Mike.
“Roy, on the bottom of both backpacks there are drops of liquid paraffin. It’s the same liquid paraffin used in the candle. The fire investigator says It’s the same liquid paraffin that was used as an accelerant.”
“Thanks Mike.”
I head to Interview Room 2 to question the wild-eyed Mr. Marie.
I enter and find him standing in the corner with his arms crossed and a mean mug.
“Why are we here? And shouldn’t you be out watching your glorious American fireworks?”
“Mr. Marie, I am detective Winder. Have a seat.”
“Now, Mr. Marie, where were you last night between 9 PM and 10:30?”
“At my shop. Till ten. Then I went home.”
“Mr. Marie, we searched your apartment and found things that tie you to the fire and the death of Professor Talbot.’
“What?! How can that be. I was at my shop. I was at home.”
“We found traces of liquid paraffin in your backpack. It’s the same liquid paraffin that is used for the candle in your apartment. It’s the same liquid paraffin that accelerated the fire in the professor’s office.”
Mike walks in and hands me the finger print results.
“It appears, Mr. Marie, that you’ve left a trail of finger prints on the fifth-floor fire escape and on the office window and on the office trash can and on the fire starter and bottle of liquid paraffin found in the trash can adjacent to the admin building. It appears that you’ve crossed a bridge and burned it behind you.”
“What are you taking about?”
“I saw the plaque on the wall of your apartment.” I look at my notes. “It says . . .
“You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. Obama, right?”
“Madisyn called me, Mr. Dick, and told me what the old guy said about her paper. She tells me everything that guy says. She told me that students complained about his teaching style and course content. They complained about his courses on ethics and religion, his Christian bias. He never includes teaching about decolonizing and anti-racism. He never includes the things that really matter!
“The “greater good!” Hah! He knows nothing about the “greater good” when there is so much injustice and so much inequality in the world!
“So yeah, I came in the window. Yeah, I threw the books on the floor. Yeah, I lit the fire. It was a statement. A statement against his old tired way of thinking. He’s stuck in the past. He needed a wakeup call.”
“Mr. Marie, did you strike Mr. Talbot?
“He came at me as I was going out the window. I only had the fire starter to protect myself. So, I swung it at him.”
Mr. Marie, did you strike Mr. Talbot?
“I struck the book he put up to his face. He was alive when I went out the window.”
“Professor Talbot perished from the fire. And now Mrs. Talbot, her children, her grandchildren and his many students must suffer the injustice and inequality of your act.”
At this point, I read Mr. Marie his rights.
“Detective, Madisyn has nothing to do with this. I waited by the window until Madisyn left the building. I didn’t want her involved.”
“We’ll see about that. Hadrian Marie, you willfully started a fire to intimidate Mr. Talbot. You are being charged with arson and the involuntary manslaughter of Mr. Talbot. Your unconstrained habits and convention will be remanded into custody. You will be encumbered by it is.”
“I want a lawyer.”
I returned to Interview Room 1 and Ms. Sawyer.
“Ms. Sawyer, video from last night has you going up to the fifth-floor, looking into Professor Talbot’s office, then walking halfway down the hall, and then walking back to his office. You are in there for six minutes.”
I show her the video.
“It looks to me that you checked Professor Talbot’s office to see if he was in there. He wasn’t. Then you hear his voice. You walk down the hallway and hear him talking with Professor Cline. Then, you go back to Professor Talbot’s office. What were you doing in there?”
“I was . . .I was writing a note about the research I found.”
“Did you see another handwritten note on the desk?
“Yeah. I looked like something a kid wrote to Professor Talbot.”
“Ms. Sawyer, we found your finger prints on the books piled on the floor. We also found your finger prints on the window you opened for Hadrian. And, we also found drops of liquid paraffin in your backpack – both backpacks found at your apartment.”
“It was supposed to be a statement, detective.”
“You mean you were showing him a different perspective when you tossed his books into a pile on the floor, opened the window for Hadrian, handed him the liquid paraffin and then left. You will be charged with murder, even if his death was not intended.”
“The last wound the professor suffered, Ms. Sawyer, was fatal. He was trying to put out the fire consuming his books. His fifty-nine-year-old heart gave out. He died of smoke inhalation and heart failure.”
At this point, I read Ms. Sawyer her rights.
~~~
Back at my desk, I make a note to call Mrs. Talbot in the morning. I’ll tell her about Mr. Marie and Ms. Madison with a ‘y’, and about Brandon Brix. I put it in my pocket with the pack of Black Jack gum.
I call my best girl.
“Roy, the fireworks are over.”
“Laci, I wrapped the case. I’ve been crisscrossing the campus all day long. My dogs are killing me and I’m beat. Listen, darling, tomorrow I’ll make sure there are lots of fireworks and then we’ll grill some steaks and watch The Thin Man.
“You never change, Roy.”
“That’s why you love me. See you soon.”
~~
©J.A. Johnson, Kingdom Venturers, 2026, All Rights Reserved
Cindy Wity 
And the Beat Down Goes On
May 4, 2026 Leave a comment
“. . . the terror of the night
or the arrow that flies by day
or the pestilence that stalks in darkness
or the destruction that wastes at noonday.” Psalm 91
Fires, floods and extreme weather will imperil a third of all life on land in the next 60 years.
Nobel Physicist Predicts END DATE For Modern Civilization: And it’s quite soon…
The New York Times’s Resident Catastrophist Delivers Another Subscription to the End of the World
You wake up in a news cycle that never sleeps. With a cup of coffee, you read what ‘doomcasters’ are saying about end-of-life scenarios appearing on the horizon. Now you are fully awake and wondering what to do with these high alert headlines? Do you let existential crisis into your life?
You sip your coffee and remember that not long ago the world was subjected to pandemic hysteria. Coronavirus, the “global crisis of unprecedented reach and proportion,” started making headlines at the beginning of 2020.
You recall the WHO declaring the coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern.” And the headlines declaring surges in COVID-19 cases attributed to the Omicron variant, a “tripledemic” – COVID combined with flu and RSV, and of overwhelmed hospitals and healthcare systems and dancing nurses.
How could you forget that Biden imposed OSHA vaccination and testing emergency standards on your business or the reality-warping restrictive policies involving mandated lockdowns, masking, social distancing, fines, and vaccines, or the CDC predicting people will die?
You pour yourself another cup of coffee and look out the kitchen window. You see the couple next store – Vivian and Zoe – walking their dog Baxter. The other day, when you took the garbage can to the curb, the apoplectic twosome accosted you with “Democracy is threatened by the likes of you extremists, fascists, racists, homophobe Christian nationalists!” and “Trump is Hitler!” They saw you going to church last Sunday.
You drink your coffee troubled that Viv and Zoe had been beaten down by another media existential crisis campaign, akin to the rollout of the COVID-19 marketing campaign that told us to worry about it, and how to worry about it.
Under the spell of the “Democracy is threatened” campaign, Viv and Zoe were in a state of emotional panic. And that had them beat down on the closest person who didn’t share their views or the views of the commercial-sponsored media. The media’s inordinate influence has you very concerned about the collective fear and confusion its campaigns were causing to psyches.
The beat down goes on . . . in our heads.
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How shall we then live in the context of existential dread?
Day after day imagination is battered with dire predictions– the end of this and that unless we do this and that. The steady beat of amplified headlines overwhelms one’s patience, strength, and soul.
Climate change, pandemics, wars, “Democracy!” AI Could Make Humans Irrelevant!
How do we respond to headlines telling us that we are done for? Should we let fear and helplessness dominate our lives? Can we live in terms of “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it”? This last way of going forward is the directive C.S. Lewis prescribes in his essay “On Living in an Atomic Age.”
Published in post-war 1948 and at the beginning of the atomic age, the essay provides a reality-check perspective and presents a scenario of how to live in life-ending times.
The following is an excerpt from the opening of Lewis’ short essay. During COVID the excerpt was passed around on the internet, with “atomic” replaced with “coronavirus.” Certainly, the essay can be applied to any dire life-threatening circumstances.
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
The full essay, in the document below, contains questions and positions Lewis maintains, such as
Are we “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it?”
Do we “hold up our own human standards against the idiocy of the universe?”
Are we the product of blind physical forces and therefore unable to provide answers to questions of a fatalist existence?
“But suppose we really are spirits? Suppose we are not the offspring of Nature…?”
“We must go back to a much earlier view.”
“We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it.”
“If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?”
“Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs.”
https://www.matthewaglaser.com/living-in-an-atomic-age
“On Living in an Atomic Age” (first published 1948) by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) From: Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis (edited by Walter Hooper; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pages 73–80
Born a few years after the above essay was published, I became well aware of ‘doomcasting’ headlines. I recalled some of the headlines in my January 2025 post Surface Readings.
The post began with the words of poet W H Auden – “Now is the age of anxiety” and my own take on things: “Impending doom has been in the news during my entire lifetime.” I wrote about the headlines and pronouncements of those anxious times which included the book The Late great Planet Earth based on the modern and heretical notion of dispensationalism.
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Imagination Reset
Taking in the spirit of the times, imaginations are exposed to the negation of life and dire predictions often made for political ends that use fear to move power into the hands of the few.
Taking in the digital tabloid times is the “WHAAM!” of a Roy Lichtenstein Ben-Day dots painting. Imagination is amped up and ready to pop with a Pow!
What happens to our imaginations when we are constantly confronted with crisis? And, how do we live with dire predictions?
With the 24/7/365 news cycle, it’s little wonder that “News Avoidance” is becoming a common way to deal with the constant specter of troubling things, as Thaddeus G. McCotter writes in I Didn’t Read the News Today, Oh Boy: Embracing the ‘News Avoidance’ Pandemic
“If you live today, you breath in nihilism … it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” ― Flannery O’Connor
What we shouldn’t avoid are resources such as poetry, art, classical literature and music to help us cope with and see beyond the terrors of the modern age. We need the signal of those who came before and dealt with all kinds of things and not the clamoring noise of influencers.
Poet Wallace Stevens, in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” writes that poetry, as it interacts with reality and the imagination, can shape our perspective and provide meaning and comfort in a world that often feels overwhelming and harsh.
Wallace emphasizes the role of imagination in countering the beat down of life. If you are a Christian, you already know that the poetry of the Psalms does just that, e.g., Psalm 91.
In the video below, Dr. Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis discusses his book, Why Literature Still Matters.
Why Literature Still Matters: An Interview with Dr. Jason Baxter | Classical Home Education
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If you need a quick antidote to climate hysteria, Itxu Díaz provides his take on the news of impending doom: Climate Change Scientists Set a Date for the Arrival of Hell on Earth: the Year 2085.
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Naomi Wolf with Outspoke: “I’m here tonight to talk about a huge news story that broke in the last couple of days. It could be thread that unravels the whole COVID virus/vaccine perpetrator issue.
“A criminal syndicate, essentially.
“Even just this initial gesture is so transformational. It breaks the spell of, “No one can be held accountable, no one can be investigated from the untouchable third rail COVID vaccine rollout, COVID virus rollout.””
“The Shocking Story of NIH Secretly Funding COVID”
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And the Beat Down Goes On
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Wreathing (Matthew 6:34)
On my shed door, atop its plastic wreath,
a robin fashioned a nest, found twigs the binding.
then, behold,
above the manufactured certainty,
within the steadfastly twig-tucked wreathing,
her brood burst burst burst forth.
J.A. Johnson, 2026
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Filed under 2026 Current Events, Climate change, COVID-19, Death, Depression, journalism, media, nihilism, pandemic, Political Commentary, social engineering, war Tagged with apocalypse, art, books, C.S. Lewis, Climate change, COVID-19, death, Democracy, entertainment, journalism, media, nuclear war, pandemics, social media, writing