On Saturday, Ingrid and I were in Sears, in the kids’ section, and I saw a guy that looked really familiar. After about 20 seconds of mental debate, I finally just said “excuse, me is your name Shannon?” He looked up and sure enough, it was, and he recognized me and we talked a bit. He had been one of Aton’s best friends, and the last time I saw him was at the funeral. He’d been living in VA, was in the middle of a divorce, and had just moved back here. Ing and I left, and when I got to my car, the car that had parked next to us had a spiderweb painted across the hood.

Aton’s signature thing (It was the late 90s, we were young) was a spider, he used to say his middle initial stood for that, and his big thing was that we were all connected by these spiderwebs, that the invisible threads were all there, blah blah blah we were writing majors blah.

So, seeing Shannon, and then this spiderweb, sort of threw me back to that, and I realized that it was August 2, 10 years to the day that they found his body. It is still making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.