Flash Friday 5-2-14 Silence is consent in Flash Friday

The pressure bandage is soaked through. Perversely I look as I’m punching overdrive through a red light in a residential neighborhood. My focus is pretty narrow and sharp; if I get pulled over the cops can radio ahead, if I don’t I’ll get to the ER faster, maybe even fast enough.

“Baby, you all right?”

She drifts in and out. It’s a concussion you want to keep people awake for, I thought, then, shit, maybe she has a concussion too.

“Everything is going to be fine,” I said, I turn down the radio, hit four thousand RPM, turn the radio back up to cover the whine of the engine. I told her not to buy a three banger, it’s unnatural, an engine should sound like rock and roll not the ¾ of a Sousa band.

“See? You know. Silence is the voice of consent.”

Her eyelids flutter, she croaks, I turn the radio off and stomp the clutch to hush up the sounds.

“What was that honey baby doll love muffin …?”

“Complicity,” she croaked, leaning her bloody side into the Scooby Doo seat cover.

“Honey?”

“Voice of complicity not consent, silence means , cough, cough, non-interference not agreement,” she spits blood and goes limp.

I fish-tail into the ambulance bay. No one comes out to tell me I can’t park there, to help, to smoke. That sharp focus wanes, I hadn’t expected to get this far. “Help!” I shouted bursting through the EMT door “A woman has been shot.”

A nurse looks at me, slow and full of contempt, she continues banging on a keyboard.

Contempt, sometimes silence is the voice of contempt. I empty my clip into the acoustic tiling.

“A woman has been shot!”