Fireworks coming like clockwork, small flames of red noise the minute he lay his head down on the pillow. Earplugs were no good. The noise was inside him, incurable. Every day he lost a little more of his silence.

When the paramedics arrived, they took my mother to the trauma center at Parkview Hospital where the attending physician counted 30 puncture wounds. Not twenty-seven or 3.14 or the square root of the hypotenuse of some obtuse triangle. Thirty.