Anything
You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You
By
Laurie Lynn Drummond
The
things that stick with me most fiercely from these stories are certain
images: a woman kneeling naked on her bed with a knife in her chest;
blood and brain oozing between bone fragments and the fingers that
hold them together; a darkened kitchen; scrubbing, scrubbing, never
clean enough scrubbing in the shower. I can't always remember to
which policewoman's stories these images apply, but now they are
part of me.
I believe that the author has
been present when violence and death have occurred. She knows that
the vapor from the inside of a body doesn't just smell. It invades
you and sticks because it knows that the only way to hold on to
this world is to become a part of you.
I believe that the author has
made life-affecting decisions knowing that while her action was
right, the effort was futile. Initially I was very disappointed
in the ending of "Something About A Scar". There are a
lot of questions left unanswered. The story was so powerful and
the ending so weak, it might have real potential as the kicking
off point for a novel. It wrangled with me for several days while
I spent time at work, reading other books or watching television,
and still the look on the policewoman's face in that final paragraph
gnawed at me. It took a while, but I think I finally I got it. In
real life, real police work is full of unanswered questions, it
is not packaged in a novel or short story. Sometimes doing the right
thing isn't ever enough. No, I wasn't satisfied at the end of this
story and neither was the officer, but that is part of her job and
now I have been part of it.
|
The
Book |
Perennial
/ HarperCollins |
January
1, 2005 |
Paperback |
0060561637 |
Fiction / Short Stories |
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at Amazon.com |
Excerpt
|
NOTE:
|
The
Reviewer |
Beth McKenzie |
Reviewed
2005 |
NOTE:
|
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