Twenty-year-old Jacinta grew up in her mother's family home in Santa Ana, California, surrounded by a grove of orange trees. Little by little, Jacinta's mother lost her-first to college, then to a boy she said she loved, and then, finally, to the rage of a school shooter. Snap. In an instant it was all gone. All she has now is her daughter's phone. Like an album, gripped in the palm of her hand-texts, photos, messages, and videos of her daughter's first three years at college. With it, Jacinta's mother is reconstructing her daughter's last three weeks.
In this uniquely moving exploration of mourning, fury, and reminiscence, Susan Straight evokes-through a grieving mother's devastating internal monologue-both a modern-day nightmare and exquisite proof of love's extraordinary power to overcome it.
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[I was holding the comb, the one from her old dresser, at the reference desk when they came in through the automatic doors, three of them wearing camouflage jackets and black hoodies, no faces, that zombie walk while they worked their phones and then the tallest one looked at me and I dropped the combed and got ready to crouch under the desk]***
(Amazon Original Stories, 27 February 2018, 27 pages, ebook, borrowed from @AmazonKindle #PrimeReading)
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There is enough packed into this short, intense story to fill a full-length novel 300 or 400 pages long. This made me cry. The author explores the painful subject of school shooters but through the eyes of the mother of a victim. The daughter's death is even more senseless as she didn't know the shooter; she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The story moves between the present with the mother trying to hold onto her sanity and snippets of her daughter's death and the last three weeks of her daughter's life, gleamed from her phone. This meanders at times but reflects the mother's state of mind. It felt so real it was painful to read.
