She was, for the first time in recent memory, dumbstruck, the word itself and even the words that made up that word—“dumb” and “struck”— rattling around her head, unrestrained and unstoppable, with dumb as in stupid and dumb as in silent doing their own private shuffle around the lethal weapon of struck. She kept trying to grab onto one of them, to make them hold still, but they were like massive wriggling fish, all muscle and teeth. Over and over again until she had to let it go.
