The moment I knew was coming was close and I still wasn’t quite prepared to see it again. I pressed pause. I thought about the woman sitting in the holding cell only yards away. Was she a criminal? Maybe. I could justify what happened to her boyfriend. The bomb incident felt more like wrong place wrong time to me, but the car? She hadn’t been driving. The accident report was clear about what happened. Her injuries were consistent with what she said happened, but still. I knew what she was. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed what my own experience was telling me, but it told me that there was more going on here.
I pressed play.
Calloway was pressing her hard. Even from this angle where I could hardly see his face I could see the spittle flying from his lips. His thinning hair shook as he nodded, saying, “You killed him, didn’t you?!”
She hadn’t asked for a lawyer. Not yet. Her expressions flickered between calm and anger so fast that it felt like a strobe effect. I sucked in a breath, and then it happened. Her body tensed as if she meant to lash out at the man. Her face was contorted into rage, and then it wasn’t. I stopped the footage. I ran it back frame by frame. The department didn’t spare expenses on the systems in Interrogation 1 and 2. We all knew that perps slipped up in spaces like this and we needed to catch everything. I don’t anyone would have thought we’d catch this.
Minute 11.1216 and 11.1219 defied reality. I used the arrow key to skip between each frame. In those microseconds her body was moving towards the detective and then, at once she was back where she started as though hitting pause in real life, rewinding, and setting herself right again. She went from angry to calm, just like that.
I used the arrows to move back and forth between the frames over and over again. I just could not understand how it happened. A technical glitch? No, it was a glitch of another kind. A genetic one. A reality glitch that allowed this strange young woman to shift backwards; to rewind herself and her actions. How and why coalesced into a gray haze in my mind.
Even if she hadn’t killed him, hadn’t been responsible, she was something entirely different from the reality I understood.
Some Thoughts:
- I’m thinking about calling this Revision vs. Rewind. It gives less away.
- I will also revise this and see what can be done with it. I might drop it on Daily Science Fiction and see what responses I get.
- Yes, the ending sucks.