camera shy, pt. 2

It was one of those things I probably should have seen coming. Nobody really gave it any thought when she went out and bought a crowbar. I mean, why should they? Everything was so perfect. She probably had a perfectly good reason. And when she got out her dad's old hunting knife she just said she was thinking of going camping soon. Maybe that was what the crowbar was all about.

She even invited me camping. "In two weeks," she said. "We'll go camping. It will be fun."

When she walked into an electronics store and smashed up all of the televisions and threw their shattered husks through the plate glass windows, it all seemed to make sense. The police didn't know what to do. It had been so long since they'd needed to do anything. There wasn't crime anymore. It was the strangest thing to watch. She looked so furious, just shouting obscenities at nothing at all, broken glass and electronics all around, the poor terrified girl at the counter just looking on.

They came and tried to talk to her, tried to get her to calm down, tried to find out what was going wrong. She ignored them. They raised their voices. She took the poor clerk hostage, knife to her neck, and demanded they let her go.

Then one of them remembered they had guns and drew on her. "Put them down or I fucking kill her," she shouted.

They complied, slowly. She picked one up and marched her hostage out into the streets. The whole world watched on the screens.

That's when the riots broke out.