Camille Griep lives and writes north of Seattle, Washington. Her short
fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have been featured in a number
of online and print venues. She is the editor of Easy Street also serves as
a senior editor at The Lascaux Review. The author of Letters to Zell (July
2015), her second novel New Charity Blues will be released in Spring 2016.
Alaska
Camille Griep
I hope you were holding hands.
I hope the last thing you did was kiss him. I hope he told you that you were his world too and that it
would be okay. I hope you believed him and that you were warm. I hope the last thing you saw was
his face, not that jaw of mountain, rock quarry and tree line. I hope it was instant and painless and
white.
I hope it was snowing.
I hope you know that if we could have done anything at all, we would have. I hope you know we
helped your mother off her knees and that one of us gave her a Kleenex. I hope you know there were
pictures and we all crowded around them, so as to stake our claim to you.
I hope you saw how big the sky was – as big as the Alaska you loved. I hope you left us before you
realized it didn’t love you back.