From the Corner of His Eye

other. Life with Naomi was a perpetual honeymoon.
        Eventually they returned yet again to the section of the railing that had almost collapsed under her hands.
        Junior shoved Naomi so hard that she was almost lifted off her feet. Her eyes flared wide, and a half-chewed wad of apricot fell from her gaping month. She crashed backward into the weak section of railing.
        For an instant, Junior thought the railing might hold, but the pickets splintered, the handrail cracked, and Naomi pitched backward off the view deck, in a clatter of rotting wood. She was so surprised that she didn't begin to scream until she must have been a third of the way through her long fall.
        Junior didn't hear her hit bottom, but the abrupt cessation of the scream confirmed impact.
        He had astonished himself. He hadn't realized that he was capable of cold-blooded murder, especially on the spur of the moment, with no time to analyze the risks and the potential benefits of such a drastic act, After catching his breath and coming to grips with his amazing audacity, Junior moved along the platform, past the broken-away railing. From a secure position, he leaned out and peered down.
        She was so tiny, a pale spot on the dark grass and stone. On her back. One leg bent under her at an impossible angle. Right arm at her side, left arm flung out as if she were waving. A radiant rumbus of golden hair fanned around her head.
        He loved her so much that he couldn't bear to look at her. He turned away from the railing, crossed the platform, and sat with his back against the wall of the lookout station.
        For a while, he wept uncontrollably. Losing Naomi, he had lost more than a wife, more than a friend and lover, more than a soul mate. He had lost a part of his own physical being: He was hollow inside, as though the very meat and bone at the core of him had been torn out and replaced by a void, black and cold. Horror and despair racked him and he was tormented by thoughts of self-destruction.
        But then he felt better.
        Not good, but definitely better.
        Naomi had dropped the bag of dried apricots before she plummeted from the tower. He crawled to it, extracted a piece of fruit, and chewed slowly, savoring the morsel. Sweet.
        Eventually he squirmed on his belly to the gap in the railing, where he gazed straight down at his lost love far below. She was in precisely the same position as when he'd first looked.
        Of Course, he hadn't expected her to he dancing. A fifteen-story fall all but certainly quashed the urge to boogie.
        From this height, he could not see any blood. He was Sure that some blood must have been spilled.
        The air was still, no breeze whatsoever. The sentinel firs and pines stood as motionless as those mysterious stone heads that faced the sea on Faster Island.
        Naomi dead. So alive only moments ago, now gone. Unthinkable.
        The sky was the delft-blue of a tea set that his mother had owned. Mounds of clouds to the cast, like clotted cream. Buttery, the sun.
        Hungry, he ate another apricot.
        No hawks above. No visible movement anywhere in this fastness.
        Below, Naomi still dead.
        How strange life is. How fragile. You never know what stunning development lies around the next corner.
        Junior's shock had given way to a profound sense of wonder. For most of his young life, he had understood that the world was deeply mysterious, ruled by fate. Now, because of this tragedy, he realized that the human mind and heart were no less enigmatic than the rest of creation.
        Who would have thought that Junior was capable of such a sudden, violent act as this?
        Not Naomi.
        Not Junior himself, in fact. How passionately he had loved this woman. How fiercely he had cherished her. He'd thought he couldn't live without her.
        He'd been wrong. Naomi down there, still very dead, and him up here, alive. His brief suicidal impulse had passed, and now he knew that he would get through this tragedy somehow, that the pain Would eventually Subside, that the sharp sense Of loss Would be dulled by time, and that eventually he might even love someone again.
        Indeed, in spite of his grief and anguish, he regarded the future with more optimism, interest, and excitement than he'd felt in a long time. If he was capable of this, then he was different from the mail he'd always