Fic: Chasing the Wind - 11. Slow hand
11. Slow hand
The years pass sequentially, as all years do- some of them faster than others and several, like when Sara left for college and Naomi came home from work to a empty nest who’s silence echoed the solitary tread of her heels mockingly back at her, impossibly long- but certain days of the year are always the same in several heart wrenching respects.
In the weeks following the end of the combat some enterprising jackass that gotten access to and spread crucial ‘behind the scenes footage’ of multiple last key events of the Yeerk war and broadcast them to the masses- no doubt the fool had meant well, but it was awful enough watching her daughter die retrospectively on a screen while government bigwigs made sympathetic noises and murmured empty platitudes the first terrible time, and the yearly revival of the same searing pain via inescapable twenty-four hour media coverage was unfeelingly brutal. The talking heads on the screen could warn viewers about the ‘graphic’ footage all they wanted, but it was rare in the beginning anyone, Naomi included, could look away- or had the heart to change the channel in the face of humanity’s overwhelming inability to look away from tragedy; as the years wore on people grew enough immune to the repeated history of what had been in the face of what currently was- and it wasn’t as if it was their daughter stubbornly sacrificing herself, chin up, tears in her eyes, and not a one of the blond hairs she had inherited from Dan out of place.
The footage always played in real time, but for her the moment in time immediately before Rachel’s death always seemed to measurably slow; the polar bear’s claws suspended in cruel limbo before speeding forward to rip into her oldest daughter’s unprotected, fragile, human flesh.
She tries not to think about how long that last moment had been for Rachel- every specialist Naomi has ever tracked down and grilled about human neurology always swears her daughter hadn’t had time to suffer, but all too often she worries that this ‘fact’ might not be true.
The years pass sequentially, as all years do- some of them faster than others and several, like when Sara left for college and Naomi came home from work to a empty nest who’s silence echoed the solitary tread of her heels mockingly back at her, impossibly long- but certain days of the year are always the same in several heart wrenching respects.
In the weeks following the end of the combat some enterprising jackass that gotten access to and spread crucial ‘behind the scenes footage’ of multiple last key events of the Yeerk war and broadcast them to the masses- no doubt the fool had meant well, but it was awful enough watching her daughter die retrospectively on a screen while government bigwigs made sympathetic noises and murmured empty platitudes the first terrible time, and the yearly revival of the same searing pain via inescapable twenty-four hour media coverage was unfeelingly brutal. The talking heads on the screen could warn viewers about the ‘graphic’ footage all they wanted, but it was rare in the beginning anyone, Naomi included, could look away- or had the heart to change the channel in the face of humanity’s overwhelming inability to look away from tragedy; as the years wore on people grew enough immune to the repeated history of what had been in the face of what currently was- and it wasn’t as if it was their daughter stubbornly sacrificing herself, chin up, tears in her eyes, and not a one of the blond hairs she had inherited from Dan out of place.
The footage always played in real time, but for her the moment in time immediately before Rachel’s death always seemed to measurably slow; the polar bear’s claws suspended in cruel limbo before speeding forward to rip into her oldest daughter’s unprotected, fragile, human flesh.
She tries not to think about how long that last moment had been for Rachel- every specialist Naomi has ever tracked down and grilled about human neurology always swears her daughter hadn’t had time to suffer, but all too often she worries that this ‘fact’ might not be true.