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Contains Sensitive Content: Mentions and brief descriptions of Death

"Forgiveness." They'd told her.

"Finding peace-"

"Moving forwards-"

Distant murmurs about pulling through, grieving, surviving.

Her fingers tighten on the black, cracked leather of the steering wheel. Knuckles white and strained.

Her mind, carefully blank.

A car whizzes by, a glint of morning sunlight flashing. She jumps, only slightly.

"-need to start moving forwa-"

Her hands tighten once more then release. Reaching up with a slow, practiced calm, she flips down the sun visor. Nestled in the thin band of elastic strung across the visor is a photograph.

She looks.

For a long minute, she looks.

A polaroid of a small boy, joyful brown curls and large amber eyes. He is smiling at the camera, a little sloppily. A pink ice cream cone clutched in one chubby fist.

Strawberry

There were smears of it on his fist and t-shirt. Still he smiled.

Smears of pink on his lips and grinning cheeks. Smears of the obscenely darkening pink down his shorts and across his arms, all bent at obscene angles, still smiling, still leering, still-

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She snaps the visor shut. It is louder than it should be, she thinks.

She ignores the shaking of her palms and the light sweat beaded on her forehead.

She ignores it all because if she doesn't-

"-need to make arrangements for-"

Blank.

Waiting. Watching.

He will come out of his house soon. She knows this as well as she knows that she will never again eat a strawberry ice cream cone or get the image of his broken limbs out of her-

Blank.

Soon he will come because he always does. Every day over the last week she has been watching. He comes.

She glances at the clock: 6:05am.

He wouldn't be late, would he? Not today. Not the day of his funeral-

Blank.

He will come.

Her knuckles drum a tune on the steering wheel for just a moment. Nothing specific. Nothing she knows. The sound falls flat. Absorbed by the thick deadness of the air.

Her hands tighten again.

Soon he will come out.

Soon he will make to climb into his work car, parked conveniently on the road outside his well-to-do red brick newbuild (far too big to fit in the driveway with the other two cars, you understand).

Soon he will emerge, bleary eyed, still digesting his morning coffee (probably lovingly prepared by his loving wife who will be draped in a silk dressing gown with her hair not a bit mussed by sleep).

Soon he will make to throw his bag into the back of his car.

And soon, he will be crushed by the weight of her 2004 Honda Accord (that's all she could afford) into the back of his own new model company vehicle. Smeared like a red smudge of

strawberry ice cream

across the pavement.

Just like he had done to her son.

Just like he had gotten away with.

Just like he had walked into court, old golf pals with the judge, and said so sorry your honour, it was an accident see? Just a terrible accident! He came out of nowhere, see? What was a good, upstanding man like me to do? So sorry, of course! I only saw him at the last minute, in his wee little blue shorts! You can't blame a guy for not slowing down fast enough, can ya? Not a good, honest fella like me, surely? I've got a wife and kids myself, you see! And I'd never let them out of my sight like that...

Blank.

She takes a deep, steadying breath.

Until her heart is slow and methodical once more.

6:07am.

His children had met him outside the court. After The Great Justice had been served, you understand.

His children had met him outside with their Mother, and hugged him tight.

His children had met him outside and they had all embraced and, to the woman, it seemed they had all been surrounded by a beautiful golden light. Because they were together and they were whole and the father had never walked out on that family and the children hadn't been butchered with nothing left to show for it than a smear on the pavement and the mother wasn't an emaciated, grieving husk of a woman left with nothing left but a ragged hole in her chest that she was determined to drown someone in.

His children had met him outside and had all embraced and they had all gotten in the car together like the big happy family they are.

And, do you know where they had gone?

Go on, take a guess?

No? No takers?

He took them...for ice cream!

She had followed, of course. What else could she do?

She had nearly laughed herself silly when she'd realised.

Nearly choked on a ragged sob dragged so wretchedly and wetly out of herself as she watched the young girl squeal in delight as her

murderous

father handed her a sickening pink cone.

Nearly cried out herself when she (quietly...you understand?) ran her hand along the gleaming, newly fixed, white bonnet of their car, feeling the last moments of her sons life being dragged brutally away under the monstrous weight of it, feeling every moment of his fear and anguish as it loomed upon him like a great, white, grinning set of teeth-

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6:12am

Three more minutes and he'd be opening the front door. Lugging his laptop bag and rucksack of protein shakes and binders. Just another day at the office.

Except this day, she is there.

And this day, there would be no morning meetings. No boozy lunch with colleagues. No half drunken, staggered drives home. No small child going through a new phase of 'run away from mummy' thinking it to be the most hilarious game in the world. No exhausted mother pushing her stroller, stopping and facing away for just a second, just to light a cigarette, you understand? (she's quitting she swears!), no-

The front door opens.

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