It’s my city I see on the news. That’s Marion Square right there, where our local sports guy is reporting from, and though it’s dark—it’s after 11 when I turn on the TV—I know exactly where he’s standing in the park from the cues I get off the lights over on Meeting Street behind him. He’s got on a polo and he’s sweaty; it’s still so hot out there, and he talks and talks, long-winded sentences that make it apparent the only thing anyone knows is that nine people have been shot by a young white male at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church over on Calhoun, a few yards down from the Circle K on the corner of Meeting and Calhoun and across the street from the Marriott Courtyard.

Nine people have been shot and a white male has done this, that’s what he knows and what we know, too, and he keeps talking and points into the dark behind him toward where the church is, then nods to his left and says something about cars over on King Street moving slowly, and he talks and talks. He’s a bit pudgy and he’s sweating out there, keeps touching his glasses to make sure they don’t slide off his nose for all that sweat, and he talks.

But I’m listening, because that’s my city right there, and this is the local news, and the sports guy, even though he’s the sports guy, is doing the job I need him to do right now, which is to make me feel like somebody I know is telling me about something terrible happening where I live. I pass the church every day—every day—and know that Circle K because I’ve gotten gas at the pumps outside for the last 28 years, but only when I’m on fumes and need it bad because the prices there are always higher than most everywhere else on the peninsula, and there’s the Arrow Dry Cleaners a few doors down from the church, the place my wife had me take her wedding veil years ago because our younger son’s fiancée would be wearing it for their wedding and everybody who knows these things knows that particular Arrow is the best place in Charleston to get wedding dresses and veils cleaned. There’s the Charleston County Public Library right there, too, where I’ve spoken any number of times on books I’ve written, and across the street the Taj Mahal, the school district’s scandal of a headquarters for how much money we spent to build it, and where I sat through the public hearing to have a book I wrote banned from the school district’s bookshelves a few years go.

This is my city on the news, and there is a kind of comfort in seeing the sports reporter talking and talking and wearing a polo and sweating and nodding and making remarks upon things and places I know. Because I don’t know what to do with the news: nine people shot, maybe all of them killed. Here.

I want him to keep talking, because even though I’ve never met the sports reporter for this channel, I know him.

But the next morning the real reporting starts, the first person I hear from, Rudy Giuliani holding forth about what he did after 9/11 while he sits on the set of the morning news program live from Manhattan. Thus begins the deluge of words from people I don’t know and who aren’t from around here and who broadcast from New York or Los Angeles or Miami and who arrive on scene to tell us all about the tragedy, and the history of the church, and of the people who have been killed, that word tragedy used again and again.