Excerpt

A Disclaimer

The children of Burke's Point Elementary can't be blamed. When the orange ball rolled onto their playground, they couldn't have known what it was. We didn't discuss the orange ball with them, didn't explain to them its importance, its danger. We didn't even tell them it existed, though some of them had undoubtedly heard vague rumors about it from sadistic older siblings and precocious cousins with little parental supervision. We wanted to turn a blind eye to the orange ball, hoping that what we didn't acknowledge couldn't touch our lives. If we didn't speak of it then surely it would have no reason to seek us out; it would roll past our town and work its horrors somewhere else, somewhere far away. Though it might bounce against the concavities of our skulls, tinting every thought orange, orange, orange, we feared to let its name roll off our tongues. We believed in the prophylactic power of ignorance, that if we provided no magnetic pole of recognition, the ball's compass would never point in our direction. So the children of Burke's Point Elementary—our children—couldn't have guessed that when the orange ball spun its way onto their blacktop and they began kicking it back and forth, shoes slapping rubber, rubber throwing up pebbles and dust, laughter spilling over the schoolyard as the ball seemed to zig and zag of its own volition, it would, for all intents and purposes, kill them all.