A split second

Rosemary Dye turned into the small sandwich shop to which she always went. She stopped at the door to let a handsome young man in a green suit pass by. He, struck by the flush of her face and neck, smiled flirtatiously and held the door open with a vaguely gallant air. She smirked happily and stepped under his arm. She turned to murmur some thanks and stopped existing. The largest part of one of the glass display cases ¹ blasted in her direction. Though fragmented before it reached her, the pieces of shrapnel and glass were still large enough to kill her instantly. […]

The young man who had opened the door for her – he was thirty-four but still had unlined skin and thick hair, had always been thought younger than he was but what had irritated him in his early twenties now delighted ² him, as he saw his old schoolfriends married or bald and he could still comfortably date girls ten years younger than he was – was also killed, though he took nearly twenty seconds to stop existing. […] Inside the sandwich shop (how unglamorous, how untremendous ³ – Northern Ireland has never dealt in epic murder sites) […], Kevin McCafferty stopped existing.

[…] So, thus, in short, an intricate, say some, mix of history, politics, circumstance and ordnance ⁴ resulted in the detonation of a one-hundred-pound bomb in the enclosed space of the front part of a small sandwich shop measuring twenty-two feet by twelve.