“You’d kill the children first, of course. Then you’d shoot the mother.”
A quadruple homicide in the quiet town of Nimrod, UT leads the residents of this “once-bucolic” town to mull over the hypotheticals of how such a thing could happen—and happen here, of all places. They (those fortunate enough to have not been killed on an ordinary Friday afternoon) walk their familiar paths down grocery store aisles while thinking on what four sets of final words might have been spoken in the Sedgman house that day, and trying to remember which cereal it was the kids had insisted they bring home. They visit their aging parents with tinfoil-covered plates in hand while trying to recall the last thing they had said to anyone in the Sedgman family, because it seems significant now. They close the door on sleeping children, walk through nightlight-lit hallways, and lie down next to husbands and wives, while knowing that, only recently, the Sedgmans had gone through these same rituals. They wonder, as they drift off, if one of those sleepers might, one ordinary afternoon, greet them at the door with a gun when only last night they had said “I love you, too” in that automatic, just-before-bedtime way. But after the hypotheticals have been exhausted (and the the bodies buried, the media flown, and the fourteen-year-old murderer locked up), each Nimrodian is forced to return to the realities his or her day-to-day: the reality of the years at the twilight of one’s life, when “life” seems to have ended long ago, though the heart ticks on; the non-hypothetical marriage that was founded on something other than love, for worse and, it turns out, for better, too; the pressing loneliness of a sinner among the saints, and the persistent way the child continues to shape the grownup, and the hopes that come and go and come again, and the friendships that do the same; and the unendurable that is endured, day-to-day, day by day. Through each of these lives, Nimrod, UT plumbs the consciousness of a place, exploring the ways individual histories add to the raveled knot of all tight-knit communities and the tight-knit characters that call such places home.
Goddfrey Hammit. 