She squinted through her glasses at his quiet, studied form, taking tiny but significant steps across the garden. It didn’t take long to get to him. A polite cough chirped out to catch his attention but he didn’t look up and over at her.

Despite the cloud of smoke over his bent head, like a grey halo, she sat a few feet away. Ten seconds later, she shimmied the skirt of her long dress with her across the length of the oak bench, even closer.

He breathed a deeply impatient sigh, and eventually looked her way.

“Hi again”, she whispered.

High above the banks of the mighty grey river, cars weave and speed and twist through the course with all the fury of a tidal wave approaching. Even higher above on a hill, sits a little blue house with two big windows, standing witness like God’s own set of eyes.

Below, they charge themselves forward, freewheeling and high full of arrogance, as it so typically goes. Despite the cautionary signs marked at every quarter mile, warning of the dangers, it’s more of the same on a rainy December morning. And amid the outcries of disbelief and anguish, the little blue house stands by silently, as if saying, “I told you so.”

The crash is a fatal one. Into the cold, dark river it goes, they go. Mangled pieces of steel and blood, all wrapped together, sinking below the fast-moving current. A crying shame, really. Another unavoidable wreckage finding its final resting place at the bottom of the mighty grey river while the little blue house stands guard, watching it unfold.