I entered a version of this story into the Australian ‘Furious Fiction’ short story competition for April 2020 and was ‘longlisted.’ There were 1,700 entries from around the world: one winner, seven on the shortlist and 47 on the longlist.

‘Till death us do part,’ he and his wife had said, at the altar of Saint Augustine’s Parish Church ten years earlier. At the time he was oblivious to the latent menace of the phrase, but now his barrister was repeating those words to a jury.
…..‘Think of the children,’ urged the Brief, ‘who have lost their mother. If you find the defendant guilty, you will rob them of their father too.’
…..The Accused recalled the early days of his marriage. How they had moved to the city. That first night in the tiny East End flat with a takeaway Madras and a litre of cider. Then the later days when she made partnership, went skiing in Zermatt with her office crowd, and something unseen had changed in her, under the surface, like the turn of a tide.
…..‘There was an argument,’ his Brief continued, ‘and then a slip, a drunken stumble, who knows? Only my client. You have heard his account. Perhaps he is not sure of all the details himself, but we have no other witness.’
…..As the Defendant listened from the dock, uninvited images from that summer night reappeared before his mind’s eye. A corporate reception at the Roof Gardens. He remembered cocktail dresses and canapes, sharp suits at a zinc bar, and his wife poised between concrete crenellations in a corner of the party. She was looking out over the dusk-lit city like a medieval archer, the bow of her wine glass in one hand and the arrow of a cigarette in the other. She pierced him with her words. He loved her and he hated her. Then she was shouting at him and he was restraining her.
…..The jury retired for two days. Time crawled up and down his cell walls like mildew. Minutes dragged into stuttering hours. In his internal eternity he trod the paths of that evening again and again, and gradually the events blurred and slipped from his grasp like a bar of soap. After a while he could not distinguish his imaginings from the facts. Perhaps the clock stopped; he could barely tell.

As she fell, she felt the panic of breathless Icarus as he plunged seaward, and the airborne rush of which the wing-clipped flamingos dreamed as they slept one-legged in the roof gardens above. She glimpsed cascades of images like frames from a runaway cinema projector. Faces, places, objects and events in no logical order, momentous and trivial: Kalashnikov rifles, strawberry lip gloss, Niagara Falls.

The Prosecution had probed. Did he have four drinks or five? What was she smoking? Whose idea was it to go to the balcony?  What was the quarrel about? Did you touch her? What were her last words? The cross-examination had robbed him of any certainty. Staring at the cell door in his interminable wait for the verdict, he watched his own life slip into the realms of reasonable doubt.

She heard a thousand sounds in those seconds: a packed-bar clatter of chatter, a snatch of early Rolling Stones, the steel-rail squeal of an approaching train; and simultaneous smells – lemon, petrol, cocaine. She felt horsehair and tasted mustard. Everything at once. This is how the end comes, then: not with a bang but with a barrage of the senses, and no time to filter or judge. Random people jostled on the strobe-lit stage of her memory: the babysitter, Spiderman, Harry Truman, Doris Day, Nastassja Kinski, Martin Luther. Rewound experiences shot by in a concatenated fury – broken bones, screaming orgasms, euphoric, drug-fuelled dances – and theoretical concepts frothed overhead like the crest of a barrelling wave: Schrodinger’s Cat, the value of Pi, Relativity. 

In Court Number One, the Foreman of the Jury rose.

Relativity. Yes, she saw, Relativity was her last chance. Quick! Think! Neurons snapped across the synapses in her brain. When a body approaches the speed of light, its particles become massless, and the passage of time does not affect them. Time for her was slowing. If she could fall fast enough before she hit the street, time

would

stop. 

*