in her eye. dow.
I, too, looked away to stare straight through the win-
Seventy.
I took her hand in mine, and she didn’t pull away, but she grasped my hand even tighter. Our fingers interlocked in her lap, perfectly entwined. I soon felt hot tears stream down my face. I imagined that they were much like the tears outside, only warmer and slower. She brushed away the streak across my cheek and kissed me lightly. I continued to stare forward.
Eighty. We continued chatting quietly to keep our minds off the present, if for nothing more. Our voices didn’t rise above a whisper and they could barely be heard over the sound of rain. Whether we made a coherent conversation was irrelevant to both of us. All we needed was to hear our voices.
Ninety. We saw it up ahead: the curve, the railing, the fall. We stared at it as we drew nearer to it. We tightly clasped out hands in a silent farewell, not only to each other, but to everyone else. All the ones who were with us over the years, they never saw anything but our smiles. But we had a lot more than smiles. One hundred. I checked the speedometer as it reached one hundred kilometers per hour. I heard the crash of the car breaking through the metal railing; I saw the lights splinter, the hubcap cave-in, and the railing fly away; I felt the quick jostle of the impact and then the weightlessness of falling. As we fell the car leaned forward and we looked through the rain-swept windshield and saw the fast-approaching ground a few hundred meters below. I let go of the gas and the whirring of the tires and engine quieted. We looked at each other and smiled. Her hand gave away and I felt myself clutching air. The seatbelt was unbuckled and the passenger seat was empty, as it had been for years.
Zero.
I’ll be with her soon.