I volunteer at the MADA Jewish food bank on Decarie Boulevard in Montreal, Quebec. The ride home takes me through what has become, without anyone planning it, a catalogue of the city’s encounters with political violence — landmarks that no tourism board will ever mark, but that the pavement remembers.

Station One: The Blood on Decarie

The MADA food bank sits mere feet from where, on a Monday morning in June 2026, Seth Scott Hatfield opened fire in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood. He killed Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, a 34-year-old Montreal police officer, and Michael Moshe Mizrahi, a Jewish civilian caught in the crossfire. Hatfield himself died in the exchange. He left behind a hundred-page manifesto steeped in Incel ideology — targeting women, capitalism, Zionism, liberalism, the usual litany of grievances that murderous loners assemble to give their inadequacy the appearance of philosophy.

I cycle past the spot. You can still see the dried blood stains on the concrete, or what I take to be blood stains — darkened patches that the rain has not fully washed away, that foot traffic has not fully scuffed into oblivion. The city moves on. The pavement does not, not entirely.