Garry Eaton

Killing Osama

Reading of his defeat, I try to imagine how the infamous gunman took his last, unflattering imprint from the fountains of hot lead. Center of world attention in a resounding, smoking silence, his quizzical, surprised trader’s face, with its beard and haunted eyes hollowed out and decomposing, he deforms into an unpredictable cuneiform of black and white meaning. To those who kill him, he is as emotionless as a tablet of aspirin dissolving in the dark.

Dusk is already scattering the light of a May afternoon as I turn to page 33, column 3, and snap on a light to read further. In the flat landscape of newsprint, I see a tall, languid figure spilling like sand from a bayonet dummy, or falling like bold face from the edge of a tipped case of Arabic type. Here he lies, in a chaotic, illegible pile swept into the corner of an inside page, between an advertisement for a religious book store and a long, broken column of obituaries. 

newsprint origami
necks craning to read
the whole story