IN HER RECENT BOOK WAVE OF BLOOD, Ariana Reines states the obvious: “It’s a big mistake to kill someone, one person, one person.” I pause on the word “mistake” there. An odd word: pared down, it means “to badly seize,” to reach out and wrap your fingers around a reality that is incorrect. It describes an act of wrongness with an undertone of sympathy, partly because it does not immediately confer a fixed intention or punishment, like “crime” or “sin” does. I am moved by her use of repetition—“one person, one person”—for emphasis, or is it continuance? Instead of counting, one, two, three, could it be: one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, etc.? Maybe it would teach us something to add it up in a slower way. Maybe when we are counting the alive or the dead, we could allow ourselves to be less functional but more accurate. Could we say “one person” fifty thousand times? “But especially the elderly, and the children, they’re completely dependent on others,” she continues. “And that is part of the way this whole thing is set up.” By “this whole thing,” she means the world. {read}