I saw her from across the room. She was sitting at a table by the door, I was against the wall. We were both on our laptops and she was engrossed in whatever she was reading. I was only engrossed in her.
She was beautiful. Absolutely stunning. Her hair was as red as the sunset. Not that orange kind of red, but a proper red. Her skin was pale like porcelain and absolutely covered in freckles. They dotted across her dainty little nose and sprinkled across her bare shoulders. She was wearing a lovely teal dress spotted with flowers with tiny straps going across her shoulders. It was difficult to tell the color of her eyes from where I sat, but I imagined them to be the most beautiful green color. Not grass-green, but the sea green prominent in the waters of the Caribbean. Then, she smiled.
They say a smile could light up a room, but before now I had never thought it possible. Yes, teeth could be a bright white, but this was different. Looking at her smile made me not only smile, but I felt as if my whole body were as light as a feather. My heart felt as if it were aching, looking at that smile.
The next events happened so quickly that I couldn’t process them until later. A minivan, blue, crashed through the front windows of the café. They say it was an accident. The driver, a mother of two young children, was fine. A few bruises but she walked away. The woman I was admiring wasn’t so lucky.
I remember moving aside turned-over chairs and tables to get to where she was sitting. I found her on the floor, a massive cut in her head that bled profusely. I lifted her up, trying not to jostle her. I knew she didn’t have much longer, not with as much blood as she was losing from a wound in her stomach. In a morbid moment, I realized her hair, that I had compared to a sunset, was the same color as her blood.
“Help me…” she whispered, barely audible over the sound of the chaos.
“I’m here,” I replied, brushing a strand of hair away from her face. My hand came back covered in her blood. “What’s your name?”
She smiled slightly, that smile that broke my heart. “Mary,” she replied.
“Well, hello Mary. My name is Adam. You’re going to be just fine.”
The woman who was driving the minivan climbed out of her car and came around to where I was holding Mary.
“I couldn’t stop,” she said as I looked up at her. She was shaking and crying. “My brakes weren’t working.”
I nodded and looked back down at the beautiful woman in my arms. Her eyes, which were indeed a lovely sea-green, were staring up at me, unblinking. She was gone.
I was still holding her limp form as the paramedics arrived. They took her from my arms and laid her on the ground.
“What was her name?” a young, male paramedic asked me.
“Mary,” I replied, staring down at her.
I reached over and closed her eyes. I had just met the most beautiful woman I had ever known and lost her at that same moment.
“Goodbye, Mary.”
