Freefall
It was odd, she thought, as the force of the car hitting her body propelled her into the air like a rag doll. Odd how the day had begun so normally, and so quickly turned into this. Still, that was the thing about life. It was fragile, just like the Waitrose lasagne that left the weak grip of her numb hands and hit the ground with an undignified splat, its contents seeping out on to the tarmac. She closed her eyes, knowing that all she had was a precious millisecond to brace herself before the same happened to her, a single sentence being the only certain thing in the tumult of her disassociated thoughts.
Falling never hurts, but the landing does.
She awoke sometime later, only it quickly became apparent that she wasn't awake, not really. It was as though she had partially emerged from a deep sleep, only to be left in a sort of limbo between the comforting safety of her own subconscious and the faint sounds of the outside world, where she could hear random words and phrases like 'brain injury' and 'broken' being repeated against a backdrop of a man's desperate sobs. She recognised the sound from somewhere, although she couldn't place it.
She remained in this state, allowing her inner thoughts time to collect themselves. Despite having no sense of the passage of time, she knew it had taken a long while before she was able to process the day's events, and put them into some sort of order, leading up to the moment where she found herself flying through the air.
The man's crying had barely ceased, although she knew who he was now. She knew why he was there beside her, and was certain that his hand would be holding hers, yet she couldn't feel it. He was her husband. He was the man she had woken up with that morning, the man who had kissed her goodbye before he headed out to work, as he did every day. She had worried about him, as she watched his car steadily disappear down the road; he had been preoccupied lately, and he had told her that the cause of this was Ricky Hanson. He told her everything, except how much his obsession with catching this man was consuming him. But she could see that anyway.
That was the reason why she had decided to go to Waitrose that afternoon, rather than Sainsbury's. She wanted to have his favourite meal on the table by the time he got home, just to provide some comfort in contrast to his dark days at work, which she guessed were probably spent dealing with some unfortunate characters in the relentless hunt for Hanson. That was the reason why she found herself on that particular street at that particular moment in time, and that was why she was here now.
She was just being a good wife to the man she loved.