Free Critical Injuries by Joan Barfoot Page A

turning just as you did when he shot.”
    Then presumably a very bad thing that she didn’t turn just a tiny bit farther, twist just that little bit harder, or faster. Then the bullet would have smacked harmlessly into the door frame, or the freezer, or the floor.
    â€œAnyway, when it nicked your spine, it obviously did some vertebrae damage, but they don’t know about that exactly yet because the bullet itself fractured, or whatever you’d call it, so part of it, just a fragment I guess, is still lodged in there. But it may ease out on its own as you get more stable, we’ll see.”
    It doesn’t seem to Isla that she could get much more stable than she already is. Immobile must be just about as stable as stability gets, short of death. She frowns, or thinks she frowns, intends to frown, at him.
    Still, once again he said “we.” Here he sits, with his face full of grief, his heart surely likewise.
    Still again, he can say “we” all he wants, but he’s not the one, is he, with part of a bullet in his spine, vertebrae damaged with paralyzing results.
    â€œParalyzed?” she inquires.
    He does not meet her eyes. “For the time being. But like I said, try to be patient. Get yourself strong. Then we can find out a whole lot more than we know now. Have some answers.”
    Be very careful with questions, she remembers again. Because the answers may not be the desired ones, or even bearable. That true thing she learned with James, and which she learned well, right into her bones, and which may now constitute something like a motto, or a creed.
    â€œIt’s a good sign,” Lyle goes on, “that you can speak. It means something to do with lungs being more or less okay. And that your face muscles work a bit, that’s good, too. I mean, you can do things like blink. You could even,” and how sweet and hopeful he looks, “probably smile, if you wanted to.”
    She can also narrow her eyes, she believes. He’s lucky she can’t raise herself off this bed. “What the hell do you think I should smile about?” is what she would like to say. “Why?” is all she can manage. Enough to make him look embarrassed.
    But he is here. He is trying. She should be grateful for that.
    No. Gratitude is pitiful, she cannot reduce herself to that. Neither can he, in the long run.
    There can’t be a long run. This doesn’t happen to her, to people like her.
    But it does. All the time people get plucked, randomly as far as anyone can see, out of the relatively untroubled crowd and plopped into true disaster. Why not her?
    Because. Because is there not some sort of quota on catastrophe? And has she not already had hers, Lyle, too? Because she was just getting started on joy again, has only had a few tempered years of it, really, with him. So who’s keeping score here, some sadist who doesn’t count or assess very well? She would shake her head in disbelief, except of course that’s one of the many, many things she can’t do.
    Well then, what can she do? She can rage. She can remember. Some rare and special shocks stay resolutely in the present — something else she learned from James. The electric knowledge about him still has enough voltage to surprise her over and over again. People speak of earth-shattering moments and may mean anything huge or atrocious. Massacre, they may mean, or murder, hurricane, birth, revelation. Revelation in some almost-biblical, certainly apocalyptic sense. Judgement day. Like a bullet.
    Now the moment just inside the door of Goldie’s Dairy Bar. Apocalypse for sure.
    Softer, more elusive events get recalled for no particularly obvious reason: a conversation, a movement, a colour, a shape; others because an internal directive says, Do not forget. Remember exactly how this moment is.
    She has to believe this is temporary. She has to bend herself in that direction.
    So when she’s back up on her