Innocent Bystander

A gunshot rings out at the station
Another urchin snaps and left dead on his own
It makes me wonder why I'm still here
For some strange reason it's now
Feeling like my home
And I'm never gonna go
- Green Day "Welcome To Paradise"
It's the same corner where I have stopped to talk to a friend about our sons getting together after school. It's the same corner where my front tire popped and I had to push my bike the rest of the way home. It's the same corner that I ride past twice a day, five days a week, forty weeks a year, for the past twelve years. It's the one with the funeral home.
Thursday afternoon was not the first time that I have seen a crowd outside. This one was mostly baggy jeans and oversize white shirts. That caught my attention. So did the red car that zipped into the parking lot. I was waiting for the light to change, because it looked like things were starting to get tense. Then I noticed a pickup had made a quick trip around the block slowing down and turning left. That's when the kid with the ponytail jumped out of the crowd, running first to the corner, then staring down the street after the pickup.
He was only a few feet away when he pulled out his gun. The revolver came easily out of his pocket and I watched him fire six shots. Down the street. In the direction of the pickup. Or not in any particular direction at all. I've been around guns before. I have fired guns before. The explosions that were going off next to me seemed much louder, and the smell of gunpowder was somehow incongruous with the late summer day.
The first police car chased the kid, the gunman, back up the street toward me. Then he cut back into the crowd in the parking lot. Another police car appeared from the other side. Then another. The light had changed, but the intersection was now full of cop cars. And cops. They had the crowd on the ground before the light turned red again.
Traffic began to move around the empty cop cars. What had been a life or death experience a second ago was now an annoyance. I got my feet back on the pedals and made it across the street. A block away, I stopped and asked an officer if he wanted to know what I had seen. "We got 'em all," he reassured me. I held on to my description and hoped that he was right. Wouldn't that be great if he really had captured all the bad guys?
The rest of the ride home felt like it took three days. My hands were shaking and I felt like I was going to throw up. I was glad to be home.
Desperate
But not hopeless
I feel so useless
In the murder city
- Green Day "Murder City"