Read Online Critical Injuries by Joan Barfoot - Free Book Online

hampered by shoes that have heels, and a blue linen suit that hugs tight to her dodging hips.
    Roddy’s finger is tightening. She is turning, but she can see him as clearly as if she had eyes in the back of her head. “Don’t imagine you can get away with something just because you think I’m not looking,” her mother used to warn. “I have eyes in the back of my head.”
    Perhaps this is inherited.
    What has Roddy inherited? A willingness to risk? The sort of physical tension that, in the right circumstances, causes a finger to grow tight on a trigger? A pure, blind, dumb tendency towards anarchy, moral, emotional, physical?
    She doesn’t know the boy. She has nothing to say to him. It seems there’s plenty of time for a great many thoughts, but not a moment for speech.
    What if she cried out, “Don’t!” or “Please!” or “No!”
    But it’s too late. There’s only time for one sound after Isla’s gasp and Roddy’s sharp intake of breath, and it isn’t the sound of words.
    She thinks there ought to be a correlation between something important happening and the length of time it takes. Tiny, stupid things, like driving home from the city, can take forever. Mowing the lawns, weeding gardens, can consume an eternity. Even watching a video on a winter’s night, feet up on the coffee table, bowl of popcorn between her and Lyle, drinks in their hands, takes at least ninety minutes, sometimes a couple of hours.
    This, though — for a long moment the world is suspended, her body is adrift in mid-air, a little pinprick of darkness grows larger and larger until there’s only a sliver of light left, then even that sliver vanishes and there’s no distinguishing between darkness and silence, it all amounts, and diminishes, to the very same thing.

Rewind
    Lyle’s version is different. Not necessarily less volatile or catastrophic than hers, but — he wasn’t there. His account has to be second-hand, third-hand, picked up from running from the truck into the disarrayed scene in Goldie’s, then from experts: ambulance attendants, cops, nurses, doctors. He is, it seems, doomed to observer status in the shocking events of his wives. Perhaps frustrating for him, maybe enraging. Possibly a guilty relief. In any case he now seems reduced, with his anxious eyes and fretful mouth: a recounter, a teller, not the actor, or the acted upon.
    Perhaps he’s just lucky.
    â€œYou’d just gone in,” he says. “We thought it’d be quick, since for once there didn’t look to be anybody around, no bikes or cars in the lot. You were only out of the truck a few seconds. You kind of waved at me in that back-handed way and I heard the buzzer as you went through the door. I was thinking what a good life, sunshine, summer, off to eat ice cream by the river, good health, you, home — I guess those are moments you live off, sort of golden ones that carry you through.”
    He’d better hope it carries them through. Nice for him, having a golden moment while she’s getting shot.
    â€œJust for a second, I couldn’t figure out what the noise was. I thought something had maybe exploded. A propane tank? I don’t know. Close and loud, and not a car backfiring because it obviously came from inside Goldie’s. I jumped out of the truck, ran in. And, you know, there you were.”
    No, she doesn’t know. For a lawyer, he doesn’t tell a story very coherently.
    â€œI couldn’t believe it. I mean literally, I didn’t believe what I saw. I’ve heard clients say that before, and I thought I knew what they meant, but it turns out I didn’t. It’s like a whole different level of consciousness, where everything is all of a sudden stark and bright and totally silent. And still. And completely not real. That could have lasted forever, that moment. I didn’t know how to end it. I just