Free Young Widower by John W. Evans

think it might be a kind of fuck you for the day. Or, perhaps, the smile is unchanged in both photographs. In our photograph my arm is draped across Katie’s shoulder. Her hair is sun-sweet. I can smell her powder-scented deodorant, shampoo, soap. I love these smells, and they are familiar. I stand there. I hear a voice telling me to look stoic. It is the end of a journey. We are victorious.
    It is something that you don’t enjoy until you see it, but then you are very happy .
    Later that week my friend Ben forwards me the email from Katie. His plan was to come to Romania from Egypt, where he lived and worked, to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. Katie had spent the last few weeks arranging his flights, accommodations, and pickup. Sara would meet him at the airport, and Katie would make some excuse to divert me to her apartment. Ben would arrive with Sara, followed by friends from the school where I taught.
    So, it was a game. There would be a winner and a loser. Or, really, at the end we would both win.
    I left Katie behind with Sara because I wanted her to plan my birthday surprise; I was being generous; I was exhausted, and my feet hurt; our journey was almost finished; I did not want to disagree with her; I was angry with her; I would not indulge her injury-denying heroics; she should let me help her; we needed to claim our rooms for the night.
    The truth is I left Katie behind on the trail because I imagined our life was very ordinary, invulnerable to trauma and tragedy. I understood the situation well enough to trust it. There was the predictable aspect and, always just lagging behind it, calamity. We would keep ahead of calamity because we always did. The Israelis and I would walk ahead until Sara and Katie and the fat, slow Romanian closed the gap and caught up. I would wait for them at the river crossing, where I could afford to sulk and feel petty. There was a range of ordinary possibilities, I told myself, to what would happen next.
    2. Arête
    The bear that killed Katie had white fur on its paws and muzzle, and for a little less than an hour it flashed white across the path of my flashlight, making a deliberate measure of her body and slowly, without pretense, pressing her chest into the ground until it made no sound and did not return the force.
    This is how Katie died: gross thoracic trauma. Her body, mauled. The body, when we recovered it, bloodless and blank. It did not appear to be mangled. We stood together over her and thought she might have had a shock. She lay at an angle on the grass, and her body was intact, her clothes were not torn, there was not so much blood as we might have expected. To look at Katie’s body, we thought she had survived the attack, or perhaps the attack had only happened in our imaginations, or to someone else, or someplace else.
    An hour earlier my group had left Katie’s group at the lake and walked a few hundred yards ahead down the path. We reached the river, where the Israeli doctor said we should wait to cross as a group. Or, her husband said, I could wait for Katie, Sara, and the Romanian while they went ahead to the smaller hostel. I watched them disappear into the darkness. I wound the mechanical charger on my flashlight, thinking that when Katie arrived I would need to show the way across. After a while, I became impatient, and then, after a longer while, concerned. What was taking them so long? I called Katie, then Sara on their cell phones. I left long, insistent messages to which they never listened, encouraging them to pick up the pace.
    Perhaps , I thought much later, the ringing of her cell phone angered the bear and inspired it to take a second pass across the ridge .
    I turned back to the path and after several false starts found my way to the lake. They were not there. I screamed Katie’s name, then Sara’s into the night wind; I could not remember the Romanian’s name. It was still louder now, but there were gaps in the wind when I could make my voice