There was an enormous boom in Boston today. I felt it as my lights flickered and speaker popped. The press say it was a meteor entering the atmosphere, creating a seismic-scale sonic shockwave as it vaporized. Blissfully unaware of the broader implications, I left to get dinner, a chill in the air and anxiety in the eyes of my neighbors. I found the pizza joint down the street and the Mexican restaurant a block further have both permanently closed. The local church and liquor store, ironically almost adjacent, have both been boarded up, offering no sanctuary by the clergy or the bottle. Police cars circled me three times, like vultures. They can sense that something sick has happened, just as I do, just as the storekeepers surely had before they fled. We are all changed now by what has entered our sky.