Prompt 219: Headlines/Theatrical Muse

They were the kind of headlines you never want to see. A revisiting of a nightmare, but there they were, everywhere I looked as I woke from my fitful sleep on that morning after.

Three Dead in Diner Robbery, One Critical...

Trina, that's her name, though the papers have yet to identify her. She was the only one to survive the terror that those at Doc Magoos must have been put through yesterday morning.

If Jing-Mei hadn't asked me to breakfast at that moment Trina might not have survived, if we had gone earlier, perhaps we would have been among the dead, I suppose it's for those reasons that Kerry scheduled the appointment with Psychiatry, it didn't make going any easier.

You would think with the violence we see on a daily basis that something like this wouldn't faze me, but, these were people we knew. People we had laughed with, whose names we knew. Suddenly the rules all change when you can put a name to the face laying there in front of you.

I don't remember how long we worked on Trina before she was stable enough to move out of the walk-in, but, even then she was touch and go. As we moved her across the drive-way Kerry tried to get us to stop, I think she saw the thing in us that neither Jing-Mei or I were willing to admit, or maybe she saw something worse, I don't know. Maybe I never will.