From Memo(i)rs of Death, chapter: Garoonka
It was a beautiful love story; you don't see those anymore these days.
It is never easy to take a young lady, but when time comes there is no turning back... At least, that’s how things are supposed to happen. That rainy night in L.A. was a different story. Cleo was laying in bed with a raging fever. She looked emaciated. The Doctor told her that it was just a mosquito bite, but the disease was far more sinister than that..
"Read me the book again, darling... I would really like to hear the story another time," she said in a hoarse whisper. But her husband knew what she wanted without hearing the words.
He leaned in to mop the sweat from her face with a white handkerchief. "Cleo, first let me try-" gripped his wrist firmly, surprisingly so.
"No darling,” Cleo urged him, “Read me the story again please. Let go of your fantasies and let me dream my dreams."
The man leaned back into his chair and picked up the book on the nightstand just next to bowl of roses, shoving aside his own newspaper where the very first page recounted how British and American forces had defeated the Italians and Germans in North Africa. He did not pretend to know why she had chosen this book - hardly bedtime reading for a dying woman. He put his glasses on and started reading again from the book she was so fascinated by:
"The narrow strip of flat black, land along the Nile generally produces three crops a year. It is much too valuable to use as a cemetery. Furthermore, it is subject to periodic saturation with water during seasonal flooding, and is, therefore, unsuitable for burial, particularly by a culture which wished to preserve the contents of the graves in sacred ceremonies.