would still be staring at me like this….” The silence suffocates me. “Speak! Please, speak woman!”
Flecks of blood painted the steel barrier. This was a painting the cameras would soon swarm over like the maggots that would devour the innocent man’s body. When she found out, when I told her, bleary- eyed, hands trembling, a look of disgust crawled across her face: a look she would employ for anything she found tasteless, be it a broken espresso machine or a bereavement. Her mouth has been shut tight at me for nearly a month. Now it opens and I watch her face carefully. She begins, quiet and controlled, then gains speed like a train before not crashing, no, but arriving at a grim and bleak destination. Her needle-sharp tongue weaves something planned, wooden, but devastating. “Jenny was my child too you know, Mark. You can think of me as a cold-hearted bitch or whatever but we can’t all afford to go off and become best friends with a bottle, can we? Do you really think you would have done something like this before you started drinking? Before, I would have held you like the boy that you are and told you that it was all going to be alright. But I won’t - because you’re not the same little boy that I loved. You’re just pissed, a murderer.”The last sentence whispered like smoke rising from a charred bonnet. The first few seconds after it happened, I watched, a bollard cemented to the ground. Shapes ran to the body and all I could hear was the thud of rubber soles against stone floors. It was like this for a few seconds until the shrill blast of people, struck with utter panic, rose from the station. It bounced into my ears. It thundered around the high ceiling through stands selling newspapers with pictures of crying people and flowers propped up against grimy walls adorning their covers.
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