Amuse-Bouche

Three days before the attack

Winter 2017, Sacramento California

3 P. M.

The truck says it’s 95. I light a cigarette, embrace my reptile side, keep the windows open, let the nicotine and heat clear my head, tap the brakes down the foothills, and don’t speed — the cops never know what to do with me. It’s early winter in the Sacramento Valley. Behind the haze of dust, smog, and heat, the horizon stretches to the blue snowcapped Sierras; they look painted by that happy hippie guy with the fabulous fro from TV. Agricultural fields make a carpet of geometric patterns. In the summer, we get Van Gough wheat yellow, but winter, it's soggy lines of viridian grass and wavy mirror shapes in the rice fields. The rivers are high. The sky, bold cerulean with smears of thin white clouds.