The Missing Minute

The word of the week for the six-sentence story prompt is SPACE, and while my first thought was the final frontier, thank you Star Trek for that brainwashing,  I decided instead to go with a space as in an absence of something, in this case a memory of a single minute of time.

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Most of the time a minute was just a minute, meaningless without the minutes that surrounded it, and then there was this minute.

This one minute of her life where there was nothing, a blank space where the memory should have been, preceded by the minutes of fighting, and followed by the minutes of far too much blood.

She was still in shock when she was taken into custody, her lawyer showing based on the news rather than a call, and she barely registered his outrage as he spoke with the police, getting her released as no charges were being filed.

She was arrested again days later, then out on bail, living as a yoyo, flitting in and out of prison, until a trial that would determine where the yo-yo ended its travels.

There were police, psychiatrists, experts, and witnesses, all paraded in and out of the court room, but In the end the facts weren’t clear, as despite the party being in full swing, no one saw who fired the fatal shot at a victim everyone had motive to want dead.

She wished that she could appreciate the reading of the verdict, revel in the not-guilty finding, but there was a minute of her life where there was only blank space, and so she would have to live the rest of her life never knowing the truth of the question, had she done it?