“How would you know?” I inquired. “I saw her, Aaron. I conversed with the police. It was the moment. The guiding wheel hit her chest. I’m so grieved.” And I said, you saw her and he said yes and I said how could she look and he said, only a tad of blood emerging from her nose, and I plunked down on the floor of the exercise center. I could hear the Colonel actually shouting, and I could feel hands on my back as I slouched forward, yet I could just see her lying exposed on a metal table, a little stream of blood dropping out of her half-tear nose, her green eyes open, looking ahead into the distance, her mouth turned up barely enough to propose the possibility of a grin, and she had felt so warm against me, her mouth delicate and warm on mine. The Colonel and I are strolling back to our apartment peacefully. I’m gazing at the ground underneath me. I can’t bring the feeling that she is to an abrupt halt, and I can’t bring believing that she can’t in any way, shape or form be to an abrupt halt. Individuals don’t simply pass on. I can’t pause and rest. I feel apprehensive, similar to somebody who has disclosed to me they will beat me down after school and now it’s 6th period and I realize beyond any doubt what’s coming. It is so cool today—in a real sense freezing—and I envision rushing to the spring and making a plunge carelessly, the spring so shallow that my hands scratch against the stones, and my body slides into the virus water, the stun of the virus offering approach to deadness, and I would remain there, glide down with that water first to the Chambal River, at that point to Mobile Bay. I need to liquefy into the earthy colored, crunchy grass that the Colonel and I step on as we quietly advance back to our room. His feet are so huge, excessively enormous for his short body, and the new conventional sneakers he wears since his old ones were peed in look practically like jokester shoes. I think about Rosy’s flip-flops sticking to her blue toes as we swung on the swing somewhere near the lake. Will the coffin be open? Could an undertaker re-make her grin? I could in any case hear her colloquialism: “This is so fun, yet I’m so drowsy. To proceed?” Nineteenth-century evangelist Henry Ward Beecher’s final words were “Presently comes the secret.” The artist Dylan Thomas, who enjoyed a decent beverage at any rate as much as Rosy, said, “I’ve had eighteen straight bourbons. I do accept that is a record,” before biting the dust. Ruddy’s most loved was writer Eugene O’Neill: “Brought into the world in a lodging, and—God damn it—passed on in a lodging.” Even auto crash casualties now and then possess energy for final words. Princess Diana said, “Gracious God. What’s occurred?” Movie star James Dean said, “They must see us,” not long before hammering his Porsche into another vehicle. I know such countless final words. Be that as it may, I won’t ever know hers. I’m a few stages before him before I understand that the Colonel has tumbled down. I pivot, and he is lying all over. “We need to get up, Roger. We need to get up. We simply need to get to the room.” The Colonel diverts his face from the beginning me and looks at me dead without flinching and says, “I. Can’t. Relax.” But he can inhale, and I know this since he is hyperventilating, breathing as though attempting to blow air once more into the dead. I get him, and he takes hold of me and starts crying, again saying, “I’m so grieved,” again and again. We have never embraced, me and the Colonel, and there is not a lot to say, since he should be heartbroken, and I just set my hand on the back of his head and say the solitary genuine thing. “I’m grieved, as well.” two days after I didn’t rest that evening. Sunrise was delayed in coming, and in any event, when it did, the sun sparkling brilliant through the blinds, the broken-down radiator couldn’t keep us warm, so the Colonel and I sat silently on the love seat. He read the chronological registry. The prior night, I’d conquered the virus to call my folks, and this time when I said, “Hello, it’s Aaron,” and my mother replied with, “What’s up? Is everything OK?” I could securely reveal to her no, all was not well. My father got the line at that point. “What’s going on?” he inquired. “Try not to shout,” my mom said. “I’m not hollering; it’s simply the telephone.” “All things considered, talk calmer,” she said, thus it took some time before I could say anything, and afterward once I could, it took some effort to say the words altogether—my companion Rosy passed on in an auto accident. I gazed at the numbers and messages scribbled on the divider by the telephone. “Goodness, Aaron,” Mom said. “I’m so grieved, Aaron. Would you like to return home?” “No,” I said. “I need to be here…I can barely handle it,” which was still mostly obvious