Images

The sun was shining, the pavements sparkling, and the grass green. All the colours blended together perfectly for Sarah, who was in her element snapping away at the picture-perfect world. A child’s grin, a macro shot of a butterfly. She hummed along to the tunes in her ears, blissfully unaware of the terror and pain occurring only two blocks away.

Matted black hair, glazed eyes and blue lips. A flash of silver as the blade comes down again and again. Only an hour or so before she was kissing him goodbye at the door, now he lays in a sea of red. The killer wears no mask, for there is no need for secrecy when your only witness will never be able to testify.

The police arrive, first on the scene. Next is the medical examiner, and then the forensics. A whirl of excitement and activity happens within the impeccable apartment, as the component parts of the NYPD jostle for attention. She can only stand and stare from the doorway. Flash of a camera, mirroring the flash of hers earlier, what seems like years ago, before she returned to find her life shattered.

It feels like hours before she is noticed, a kindly young detective spotting her and quickly hurrying her away from the scene. The damage is done, she had seen everything. The stab wounds, the slash across the neck. The detective turns out to be called Marcus, a pleasant enough man trying to distract her with chit-chat about the nice weather they’d been having.

The clouds rolled overhead, the ominous cracking of lightning, before the rain poured down. It only took thirty seconds for New York to transform from blazing sunshine to shuddering cold, as it only took thirty seconds for her to drain the life from his body. Sarah stands in the rain, the glazed look of one told she’d never see her husband again.

She hears the comforting words, they run through her like she ran through him with the knife. She has the shocked expression and floods of tears down to a tee. Stood in the streets of New York is the image of a grieving widow and a detective. Images lie.