She smiled, a smile that I hadn't seen in a while. Who can blame her? She had just lost her dad to the cold, steely grip of death, her mum to the painful death of a broken heart and her brother to an emotionless answering machine. I was the only one that had stood next to her, the only one to not put her name down in the mud. Ahh, her name it rolled off of the tongue like a piece of velvet from the sowing machine. I had not put her down, but instead picked her up, nurtured her and helped her through it. If only I had seen the light. Huh! Even if I was paying attention and not been lost in her gaze, I wouldn't have seen the light, for the lampposts were on full blast that night. The car, driven by a drunk and belligerent fool was hurtling towards us at a speed faster than that of love. But nonetheless, I felt her love and she felt mine. We were like two orbiting asteroids circling each other, drawing ever closer due to the gravitational pull, in this case our ardent love for each other. But, the sudden blast of a solar flare from the burning Sun, cast the two wandering asteroids astray, in pieces. When the car hit, I was flung to the right with a parting gift of two broken ribs, a fractured wrist, snapped femur bone and a tear in my eye. I couldn't move, I was left there watching my love be crushed by the car, her delicate skin scraped and split, her dainty blood being split over the unworthy pavement. The car stopped, the deep red lights of the car bathed her face and body in red, you couldn't tell blood from light. The Devil stepped out. He looked like a normal man, suit tie, everything. I learn't that he had just left his wife. But that didn't subdue my hatred for this man. He came and looked at us, dropped to his knees and knelt there for a few minutes. Then he got up and sped off when he heard the sirens. I woke up in the hospital. She didn't wake up in the morgue.



I woke up, full of tubes, covered in bandages and drugged up to my eyeballs. I opened my eyes to a bright, well lit hospital room. Complete with sterile air, beeping heart monitor, trip inducing IV drip. It even had the visitors chair. I asked the nurse to take it away as it reminded me of the emptiness of my heart, the hole in my soul and the longing for contact with someone who loves me, knows me and will hold me. That person was now two stories under the ground. Frozen in a seven foot long rectangle, lying on a stainless steel tray in a black bag with a zip. As soon as I was able, I took what seemed like a marathon down to the morgue. She was reduced from a woman to just a series of five numbers. '249-76'. A number that will echo in my mind till the day I join her. I opened the cold door and pulled the tray out from the steel coffin. I stared at the bag, willing myself to open, but not wanting to. I was afraid that i wouldn't recognise her, that my memory of her would be ruined, that her porcelain face would be shattered and cracked, that her water coloured features would be faded and run. I finally talked myself into unzipping the zip. As I did, I thought of all the horrors that could await me under the blanket of death, the barrier of unknowing. Nothing could have readied me for what I saw next. It was a rather fat man staring up at me through closed, purpled eyelids. I was taken aghast. I thought that I had gotten the right number and tray, no! I was sure of it! I turned back and spoke to the man who was seemingly lost in a jungle of paper work.

"Hello? I was wonder-"

"Sssshhhhh!" hissed the frantic man.

I waited for a few seconds, then he found what he was looking for and politely said; "Yes? How may I help you sir?"

"Oh! Um... I am looking for my fiancé."

"Then sir, perhaps you should try somewhere more... living."

"No, my fiancé is supposed to be down here in draw '249-76'