Famous Last Words

by Gillian McAllister

He had replied with a single word: Shit! It had made Cam smile. She likes language in all its forms, and a well-timed swearword is the best.

There are a thousand ways to hold a gun, and only a few of them point to a likelihood of shooting. “Aiming doesn’t mean shooting.” One of the many things Niall learned on his training is that there are facts and there are assumptions. Niall tries to deal only in facts.

Amazing where the fear goes, when it comes to it: it just disappears. If you do something often enough and don’t die, then you somehow think you never will, like when you first learn to drive a car and think about crashing all the time, but within a year are steering with your knees and eating burgers.

Funny how some people have a way of pulling a version out of you that isn’t really you.

Funny how long you can float along without a plan.

parenthood is an exercise in mindfulness that you didn’t even know you needed.

The thing about grief is that, when it happens to you, you go through the looking glass. Suddenly, everyone else lives one kind of life, with one set of problems, and you another. You’re in a different world now, one you can never return from. And you only realize too late how good the first world was.

funny how he still relies on instincts, even after they let you down. Sometimes, it’s the only thing you can do.

People work on the basis of these small exchanges. Not the words used, but everything else. Human interaction is twenty percent words, eighty percent other. Body language and tone.

I think”—he clears his throat—“that maybe it’s easy to regard yourself as other—and obviously what happened to you is huge. But actually, may I remind you that most everyone feels utterly fucked up by life.”

As ever in parenting, the moments you fear happen suddenly, without warning, and you have to fudge it, or it feels like it.