Excerpt of Flash by Donna Ball

There were things about people that Flash was not certain he would ever understand. They seemed to have an almost boundless capacity for loving life, like the way Grady loved Aggie and Aggie loved him, and the way they both loved Flash, almost as much as he loved them back. Like the way Grady would build fences on the beach in the spring so the sea turtles would have a safe place to lay their eggs and the way Aggie and Lorraine and all the neighbors up and down the lagoon and even Mo had waded waist deep into the water to try to help a manatee who’d been hit by a boat. Like the people at the dog parade, all dressed up in silly costumes, laughing and talking and marching up and down the beach so that others of his kind would have a safe place to sleep and didn't have to eat out of garbage cans.

And yet, as much as they loved life and each other and all things alive, people were astonishingly careless, almost cavalier, about death. Flash understood death, of course: the dead jellyfish on the beach, the dead fish in the bucket.

The dead squirrel in the yard.

Dead happened, like sunshine happened, like rain and white surf happened. What made little sense to Flash was how people could so easily make dead happen, particularly to those of their own kind. They didn't need to. They just did. A man with a knife on the night of blood and thunder. A man in a car beneath the water. Dead, dead, dead. Dead and gone. Over, full circle.

Except that it wasn't really over, and that was the part that perplexed Flash the most. Aggie and Grady and other people he loved, like Bishop who smelled of fish and dog biscuits, and Lorraine with the sparkly earrings and even Pete—they seemed to like thinking about the dead things, and talking about them, and going over and over them in their minds. They talked about how it had been, and when it had been, and why it had been, and then they watched it on the television and stared at it on their computers and talked about it some more. They couldn't change it by talking; they couldn't change it by thinking. But they did it anyway. They couldn't let it be over.

Flash did not want to think about the knife, or the man in the car. Or the squirrel. But it worried him that until he knew why Aggie did, he would never really understand her. So he listened.