After my father died, I could only dream of disaster. My mother had shown me an image of an airplane crash published in the the local newspaper. All souls lost at sea, the horror of exploding jet fuel flashing through an airplane cabin, the screams of the passengers whip-lashed into the amber dusk. The retrieved wreckage had been hoisted onto a dock and cloaked in viscous plastic sheeting, poorly concealing the catastrophe. If I die like that, said my mother, leave me there. For a year, I dreamed of bulbous, shark-nosed jets plummeting to the ground. I’d attend Little League baseball practice, but I couldn’t get a hit, waiting, instead, for the rest of the corpses to fall out of the sky.