Otis.

Leon.

Two small suns,

stories just beginning,

dawn left unfinished.

Small shoes by the door.

The world keeps moving.

Silence answers first.

They were alive only days ago.

Big hearts, big needs, big smiles.

They were precious, they are precious.

They seize this moment to stare into the cameras and murmur words like, “We understand why they did it.”

As if understanding is a balm.

As if explanation is not already a blade.

They gnash their teeth, gnaw on the bones of disabled lives, picking them clean for meaning.

They consume every damnable reason they can find—fatigue, overwhelm, systems stretched thin, anything that might make it reasonable to murder Autistic children.

Their mouths are full of empathy for the killer.

Their hands are empty of justice for the dead.

They speak of burden.

They speak of strain.

They speak of tragedy as if it arrived by weather, uninvited and blameless.

As if it did not crawl out of a culture that has long rehearsed which lives are expendable.

Their breath is hot with eugenic malice, even when they call it compassion.

Especially then.

Because what they are really saying is this:

some children are too much.

Some lives ask too loudly to be kept.

Some endings are easier to swallow than the work of care.

They do not mourn Otis.

They do not mourn Leon.

They mourn the inconvenience of loving a disabled child in a world that refuses to change.

They want the story to end where responsibility begins. They want mercy without reckoning. They want to look away while still feeling kind.

But there is nothing kind about a society that understands murder before it understands disabled life.

There is nothing humane about a grief that circles the killer and never reaches the child.

Autistic lives are not cautionary tales.

They are not arguments.

They are not metaphors for collapse.

Autistic lives should have punctuation.

They should finish.

They should not be cut short so the world can keep its hands clean.