The grisly scene

Rarely do I come across evidence of such a dramatic story. The violence and heavy symbolism of this one led to easy interpretations, but I find the easy interpretations are never quite all the way true.

But let me tell you.

I took my regular walk into the University. It was my first cold morning of the season. Strange pebbles of white ice, almost like hail, were scattered thinly on the sidewalks. The water features of the University were frozen into hard sheets of cracked ice.

Something had happened up on The Scholars' Walk. This is a path lined with glass plaques engraved with the names of honored scholars from the University's history; MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars, Nobel Prize Winners and dozens and dozens of other categories you may or may not have heard of. One of the plaques was shattered. I don't know what the honor category was because far too much of the glass was broken. Only a small portion of the bottom of the engraved glass remained, with jagged spears holding the last few bits of lost names. The walk was strewn with glass...

And blood.

Great splatters of blood weaved along the walk. Like a tracker I followed it, but I needed no skill or intent as it marked the path I was traveling anyway. Here is where the person listed to the side and paused, raining blood, before stumbling on. There the blood splashed down, there flung, there dripped. And ever it marked the weaving way leaving the scene of the smashed monument.

People are just full of blood.

I noted the splashes and trails with irresistible interest. But finally, at a corner, I had to part ways with the path of blood, which, hopefully, may have been thinning. A bleeding wound can do one of two things: clot or run out the source.

What a sight. What a trail. I'm thinking I won't ever find out the story, but stories are for making up anyway. 

For me I picture a drunk scholar, perhaps a chemist, passed over again by the National Honor Society of Chemists, expressing the frustrations of his unrealized dreams as twilight falls on his career. He is teaching Advanced Chemistry today, badly hungover, but with a secret twinkle of satisfaction in his eye, and all the while with the class eyeing his mysterious great white bandage, wrapped copiously around his right arm and hand.