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.