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.