Anna
Panic hit him like a knife in the chest. He felt a cold possess him even as his body rejected the scene in front of him. His knees hit the hard wet sand, but he didn’t feel the pain. He didn’t feel anything but cold. He didn’t see anything but Anna. Anna with her bubble gum smile and her choppy raven hair. Anna’s warm brown eyes seeking his with a joke on her lips. Anna who was always strong, always there. His Anna.
“Oh God, I can’t. What happened?” He gasped
He looked at Ian, willing him to have an answer. Ian had tears running freely down his face.
“She messed up the return” he sputtered, “ it was going fine, we were almost back. Her fucking pins.”
He threw his arms in a gesture half apology and half despair then turned away sobbing. He would sacrifice these last few minutes to Graco. Gently, Graco drew her to him, holding her head to his chest. The sight of her blood soaking into his clothes would forever burn in his mind.
"Anna, baby, please." He whispered.
After all of his efforts, she lay there in his arms, the life running out of her in a river of red. His strength left him. His helplessness crashed down on him like a rockslide. No time to think, no time to react. He choked out the last words she’d hear in this life in a pleading rasp,
“Anna please.”
His voice caught on her name, and it stuck in his throat like hot wet sponges, suffocating him.All his love, all his pain and desire, and his selfish need for her, and she was going anyway, without him.His singular thought, as she faded from this world was I love you, I love you, I love you.
She was dead, and all the light and love in the world had gone with her. Graco placed a kiss on her vanishing cheek, his hands grasping handfuls of wet packed sand, as she disappeared back into the place in between. She hadn’t made it back. This girl who knew in him inside and out. This girl who was his conscience, his reward for a life lived against all his darker instincts. She had been his virtue, and without her he knew he would follow a bleaker moral compass.
He turned toward Ian, who was looking at him with grief in his own eyes. He was standing in the shoreline in the late afternoon sun. The rain had come and gone leaving the air heavy and humid.He was silhouetted against the fading light. Graco slowly and purposefully got to his feet, strode over to Anna’s brother and punched him squarely in the jaw.
