Crime Hits Home--A Collection of Stories from Crime Fiction's Top Authors by S.J. Rozan

Author:S.J. Rozan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2022-01-20T19:36:47+00:00

* * *

“And what was in your mind when you jumped up on the table and started running?” Ferral Ericson, the forty-seven-year-old Scandinavian psychiatrist, asked. She had brown-and-gray hair with a face that Tom thought of as sharp.

“Um...” Tom said. “I, uh, was moving real slow.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” the doctor primed.

Outside the window there was a hummingbird darting from flower to flower. Tom loved birds, especially hummingbirds. Mrs. Crandel in tenth-grade remedial English had said that those birds were a Met For, something like that, hummingbirds and somehow that meant he wanted to be free like his ex-slave many-times-great grandsire that came up with his family name.

“It was like I was in a dream one time and this giant was chasing me and I was running but I couldn’t get nowhere.”

“Like slow motion on television?” Ericson suggested.

“Yeah,” Tom said. He was listening to the doctor but he was thinking about something that he couldn’t remember about the fast-winged bird.

“You felt that you couldn’t get to your friend in time to save him,” Ericson interpreted.

Turning to her Tom replied, “It’s like that hummingbird. She’s faster than anything but sometimes she’s just stuck in place.”

“You loved your friend,” she said.

In prison you never said that you loved anybody but Jesus or your mother; that was more or less a hard-and-fast rule. Tom had been raped and forced to do other things dozens of times but no one ever told him they loved him.

They hurt him, they spit on him, they beat him like a dog but no one ever loved him, no one except for maybe...

“What do you think about that little bird?” Ericson said.

“That she loves red roses and that they like her too.”

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