The Fourth State of Matter

Content Warning: This discussion of themes references mass shootings, school shootings, gun violence, and suicide.

Beard’s story provides multiple narrative threads that work together to build a greater picture of Beard’s life around the time of the fateful shooting. These different moving pieces are all difficult stressors for Beard, and the combination of all of them and Beard’s lack of action suggest a sense of overwhelm toward her problems. This anxious stagnancy that Beard experiences in the narrative creates building tension surrounding the mundane, which is then turned on its head after the shooting. No longer are Beard’s everyday stressors such an extreme concern, and even the squirrels in the upstairs room are missed.

There are three major threads in the story that represent mundane things out of Beard’s control. Beard establishes one of her primary stressors in the opening sentence: “The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream” (Paragraph 1). The collie, never named in the essay, is aging, tottering around “on her broomstick legs” throughout the essay (Paragraph 2), needing to be carried upstairs by Beard, having accidents in the house, falling over outside onto the grass and even down stairs.