Farewell Comrade

Abstract

Verbatim from Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons. Not paraphrased, not summarized.

The man in the coffin, the body in the coffin, was not he. For one thing, he needed a cigar. Those thin, colorless lips clamped tightly together would have told me he was dead even if all the other clues had been absent. His lips were what I remembered about my husband's Uncle Harold. In life they were thick and red and always cradling a wet stub of unlit cigar. I had nearly always gagged to look at it, a fat brown stump, slobbered all over at one end. But the way he held it absently in the drawn-up corner of his mouth might have also contributed to the other thing I remembered about him, the hint of a smile that made him always look slightly bemused.

Author

• Maue, Terri Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University