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“Shoot.

“Oh, shoot!

“Shoot, shoot, shoot.”

Yes, that was what Lorin said. She couldn’t deny it. She heard it leave her lips. Shoot? Any number of profanities would have been more appropriate under the circumstances, but her mother’s training was kicking in when least expected.

She would say more later – much more – but right now there was no time. She had to concentrate on moving her foot from the gas pedal to the brake; had to convince her reluctant right hand to let go of the steering wheel and shift the car into park at fifty-five miles per hour – screw the transmission. Had to remind herself not to scream. Not to surrender to the small voice telling her “This is it, little girl. Say goodbye.”

One front wheel caught pavement; the other tried to keep rolling a few feet farther. The rear wheels attempted to pass them both as the chassis fishtailed to the right. Her left temple recoiled off the driver-side window and the road in front of her vanished. She expected to see stars. Instead there was churning water. Dark, surging, bubbling water where seconds before there had been a parade of rush-hour traffic, a row of orange barrels, a highway worker waving a flag. A bridge.

Metal screamed against metal. The stench of overheated rubber and smelting steel filled the car. Was that her engine locking up? Or was it an axel grinding against a wedge of concrete rising to kiss the underside of her vehicle? Her brain simply couldn’t compute the changes fast enough. Someone behind her was leaning on a horn. A woman was wishing her son was buckled in. A man was regretting an argument with his wife. A teenager was thinking this was a shitty way to go: too soon too soon not ready yet.

As for Lorin, she was wondering if she had time to save her own ass, let alone theirs.

Relax, she ordered herself. Let yourself go limp.

She couldn’t. Terror was getting in the way. But even if she could, would she have enough strength to hold up an entire car? To keep it from nose-diving into the Mississippi?

mommy, she shouted. help i love you i am so sorry.

Then everything stopped.

No more twisting. No teetering. No head banging. No impending meeting with her maker. Behind her, she could feel the other drivers sagging into their bucket seats with relief. An atheist was praying over and over, thank you god thank you.

Lorin did neither. She had only a heartbeat of time to grab the camera off the passenger seat, stand up through the sunroof of her Firebird, and start shooting.

Ahhh. So that explained her strange choice of final words. A professional to the bitter end, eh?

She groped blindly for the leather case, expecting to find thin air. What luck! It was still there. Her Nikon hadn’t slid to the floor. Better luck, the top was unzipped. And the telephoto lens was within easy reach. And she had charged the camera’s battery this morning. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

With her car skewed sideways at the end of a road that no longer stretched before her, Lorin had a front-row seat to the disaster. The corner of her bumper protruded out over the remains of the bridge that until seconds ago had connected Minneapolis to St. Paul. The roadway had pancaked down, one span at a time right in front of her, leaving her in a perfect position to record the after-events. Odds were good she was the only photographer so close to the edge. The only one so prepared. The only one so freaking lucky.

Again.

Though Lorin would not note the similarities until later, this was just like the afternoon when a gas leak had caused a vacation home on the Atlantic coast to explode in a flaming fireball right before her eyes. On that occasion, she had been a seagull’s cry away, her camera pressed to her eye to capture the bird’s cartwheels against the weathered siding.

Caw. Caw. Boom.

There one minute. Gone the next… except for the fiery last gasp caught on film.

Accidental gold, an editor had called it. Pure luck. Don’t expect them all to be that easy.

Of course, he had been wrong. The man hadn’t foreseen a morning nine months later when Lorin would be strolling along a New York City street, her camera slung around her neck. He hadn’t imagined her eyes would be drawn to the sunlight glittering off a construction crane. He hadn’t factored in the possibility that the steel gridwork would be transformed into a golden spire. Or that Lorin would lift her lens on a whim.

When the crane began to groan, she was already focused on it. By the time it doubled in two and crashed into the apartment building, she’d caught its collapse in a series of dramatic stills.

All told, today’s bridge failure would be Lorin’s third career-making photo capture in as many years.

“Oh mama,” she muttered, her finger clicking madly.

She wasn’t thinking about the woman waiting for her at home. She knew Mama Di was standing at the door ten miles away, her hands clamped over her mouth, calling, calling, calling with her mind – begging to be told if her only child was unharmed. But Lorin would not answer her. Not yet. Not while her mind was buzzing with the sickening glee that always seized her during catastrophes like this. Her hands were perspiring, her heart was battering her ribcage, and adrenalin was pouring through her veins. She would be a fool to waste the charge on reassurances. She wasn’t hurt or dying, was she? Her mother could wait. Lorin had to focus her energies on the images in her viewfinder.

There. That one. With a click, a mushroom cloud of concrete dust became trapped in the sky forevermore, never to be blown away.

Climb higher. Get the shots down in the river. A foot on the dashboard, a finger on the shutter and a black truck sank no deeper into the swirling muddy current.

The school bus! Hold the button down, don’t release. A small body will halt in mid-jump, a woman in a blue coat will wait to catch her indefinitely, an emergency door will never close. The open maw, the flying pigtails, the shadowed faces pressed against the windows will remain frozen in this position, at this age, in these colors for all time. Or for as long as the photo is archived and protected.

Stop. Shift left. That one. One snick and the man in hard hat and day-glow vest will stop his mad scramble up the tilted roadway. He will not fall, but neither will he reach safety. He will live forever on the precipice, immortal, resurrected on the anniversary of this horrible event year after year. Alive but imperiled for eternity on the pages of newspapers reliving the tragedy.

The young woman behind the camera could hear a riot of frightened thoughts, could feel each individual’s terror in her head. But there was no time to listen or try to ease the victims’ fears. She had a job to do. It wasn’t what her mother would want, or would do if she was here, but Lorin had accepted long ago that the two women were very different. Later, she called to the desperate subjects in her viewfinder. Hang on. In a minute. Almost done.

Out loud, she said something quite different. “Again. Again. Again,” she murmured with each click of the shutter.

Lorin Dell Karson was in the right place at the right time. Again.

Description
“Shoot.

“Oh, shoot!

“Shoot, shoot, shoot.”

Yes, that was what Lorin said. She couldn’t deny it. She heard it leave her lips. Shoot? Any number of profanities would have been more appropriate under the circumstances, but her mother’s training was kicking in when least expected.

She would say more later – much more – but right now there was no time. She had to concentrate on moving her foot from the gas pedal to the brake; had to convince her reluctant right hand to let go of the steering wheel and shift the car into park at fifty-five miles per hour – screw the transmission. Had to remind herself not to scream. Not to surrender to the small voice telling her “This is it, little girl. Say goodbye.”

One front wheel caught pavement; the other tried to keep rolling a few feet farther. The rear wheels attempted to pass them both as the chassis fishtailed to the right. Her left temple recoiled off the driver-side window and the road in front of her vanished. She expected to see stars. Instead there was churning water. Dark, surging, bubbling water where seconds before there had been a parade of rush-hour traffic, a row of orange barrels, a highway worker waving a flag. A bridge.

Metal screamed against metal. The stench of overheated rubber and smelting steel filled the car. Was that her engine locking up? Or was it an axel grinding against a wedge of concrete rising to kiss the underside of her vehicle? Her brain simply couldn’t compute the changes fast enough. Someone behind her was leaning on a horn. A woman was wishing her son was buckled in. A man was regretting an argument with his wife. A teenager was thinking this was a shitty way to go: too soon too soon not ready yet.

As for Lorin, she was wondering if she had time to save her own ass, let alone theirs.

Relax, she ordered herself. Let yourself go limp.

She couldn’t. Terror was getting in the way. But even if she could, would she have enough strength to hold up an entire car? To keep it from nose-diving into the Mississippi?

mommy, she shouted. help i love you i am so sorry.

Then everything stopped.

No more twisting. No teetering. No head banging. No impending meeting with her maker. Behind her, she could feel the other drivers sagging into their bucket seats with relief. An atheist was praying over and over, thank you god thank you.

Lorin did neither. She had only a heartbeat of time to grab the camera off the passenger seat, stand up through the sunroof of her Firebird, and start shooting.

Ahhh. So that explained her strange choice of final words. A professional to the bitter end, eh?

She groped blindly for the leather case, expecting to find thin air. What luck! It was still there. Her Nikon hadn’t slid to the floor. Better luck, the top was unzipped. And the telephoto lens was within easy reach. And she had charged the camera’s battery this morning. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

With her car skewed sideways at the end of a road that no longer stretched before her, Lorin had a front-row seat to the disaster. The corner of her bumper protruded out over the remains of the bridge that until seconds ago had connected Minneapolis to St. Paul. The roadway had pancaked down, one span at a time right in front of her, leaving her in a perfect position to record the after-events. Odds were good she was the only photographer so close to the edge. The only one so prepared. The only one so freaking lucky.

Again.

Though Lorin would not note the similarities until later, this was just like the afternoon when a gas leak had caused a vacation home on the Atlantic coast to explode in a flaming fireball right before her eyes. On that occasion, she had been a seagull’s cry away, her camera pressed to her eye to capture the bird’s cartwheels against the weathered siding.

Caw. Caw. Boom.

There one minute. Gone the next… except for the fiery last gasp caught on film.

Accidental gold, an editor had called it. Pure luck. Don’t expect them all to be that easy.

Of course, he had been wrong. The man hadn’t foreseen a morning nine months later when Lorin would be strolling along a New York City street, her camera slung around her neck. He hadn’t imagined her eyes would be drawn to the sunlight glittering off a construction crane. He hadn’t factored in the possibility that the steel gridwork would be transformed into a golden spire. Or that Lorin would lift her lens on a whim.

When the crane began to groan, she was already focused on it. By the time it doubled in two and crashed into the apartment building, she’d caught its collapse in a series of dramatic stills.

All told, today’s bridge failure would be Lorin’s third career-making photo capture in as many years.

“Oh mama,” she muttered, her finger clicking madly.

She wasn’t thinking about the woman waiting for her at home. She knew Mama Di was standing at the door ten miles away, her hands clamped over her mouth, calling, calling, calling with her mind – begging to be told if her only child was unharmed. But Lorin would not answer her. Not yet. Not while her mind was buzzing with the sickening glee that always seized her during catastrophes like this. Her hands were perspiring, her heart was battering her ribcage, and adrenalin was pouring through her veins. She would be a fool to waste the charge on reassurances. She wasn’t hurt or dying, was she? Her mother could wait. Lorin had to focus her energies on the images in her viewfinder.

There. That one. With a click, a mushroom cloud of concrete dust became trapped in the sky forevermore, never to be blown away.

Climb higher. Get the shots down in the river. A foot on the dashboard, a finger on the shutter and a black truck sank no deeper into the swirling muddy current.

The school bus! Hold the button down, don’t release. A small body will halt in mid-jump, a woman in a blue coat will wait to catch her indefinitely, an emergency door will never close. The open maw, the flying pigtails, the shadowed faces pressed against the windows will remain frozen in this position, at this age, in these colors for all time. Or for as long as the photo is archived and protected.

Stop. Shift left. That one. One snick and the man in hard hat and day-glow vest will stop his mad scramble up the tilted roadway. He will not fall, but neither will he reach safety. He will live forever on the precipice, immortal, resurrected on the anniversary of this horrible event year after year. Alive but imperiled for eternity on the pages of newspapers reliving the tragedy.

The young woman behind the camera could hear a riot of frightened thoughts, could feel each individual’s terror in her head. But there was no time to listen or try to ease the victims’ fears. She had a job to do. It wasn’t what her mother would want, or would do if she was here, but Lorin had accepted long ago that the two women were very different. Later, she called to the desperate subjects in her viewfinder. Hang on. In a minute. Almost done.

Out loud, she said something quite different. “Again. Again. Again,” she murmured with each click of the shutter.

Lorin Dell Karson was in the right place at the right time. Again.