"Can I Get a Witness?" Summary

A fifty-year-old Spokane Indian woman who is a paralegal for a Seattle civil rights law firm is finishing her lunch in a local restaurant when a Syrian-American man enters and detonates a bomb that kills forty-two and injures thirty-seven people. As she struggles to extricate herself from the wreckage of the blast, after being knocked unconscious, a middle aged white man approaches and tries to help her. The man takes her by the hand and leads her away from the scene and then asks if he can take her home. Still dazed and off-center, she asks him to take her to his home.

The man imagines that the Indian woman might be a terrorist because of her dark hair and brown skin. He also imagines having sex with her. In his apartment at...