The Crumbs Alternate Ending

Today, he was going to die. Not by his own hand but rather by will. It was time. He will arrive at the park bench that overlooks the water at two o’clock later this afternoon. It was their favourite place, Ana and his. They used to sit and feed the chickadees that scurried out of the yellow broom brush onto the path at their feet. Seagulls would swoop down, or ocean rats as he would call them, and attempt to embezzle the crumbs. Ana would bundle up in her warmest jacket, leather gloves with the insulted insides and knitted toque with the bobble on top. Yet, she would still profess she was cold. She would sit snuggled against him, her arm looped through his and her hand in his jacket pocket. Now, today, he will sit alone for the last time. It

“The roads were torn and muddied from the tanks. The rain made the heel of her shoe stuck.” His fingers rubbed at the stems of the tulips and circled the cut bottoms held by a rubber band. The ridges of the fibres tickled at the flat of his thumb. He was sixteen at the time and the waft of her cheap eau de toilette infiltrated his nostrils while she leaned into him for balance. Her cheeks blushed with each chunk of caked-dirt that fell to the ground from the stem of her black high-heel. She had a nervous giggle. He grew up in Heidelberg, which had been known for its deep roots in culture and the arts. It had earned a reputation as an intellectual epi-centre being home to Germany’s oldest University. Romance ricocheted from the medieval rock castles, stone and mortar churches, and bed-rock road work joined by triple-arched bridges. Then, the Nazi’s came. The city became quiet and terrorized with being named the stronghold for the Third Reich. The non-Aryan professors were fired from the university in 1934, and within four years the Nazi’s had burned the Synagogues, and flocks of Jews were shipped out on trains: Dachau Concentration Camp.
“Ana and I became friends, inappropriately so, my mother once said one night when I brought Ana to dinner.” The bus jerked to a stop and he caught the metal brace on the side of the bench with his hand. A middle-aged woman with groceries and three kids boarded. She shooed them down the lane with their fingers in their noses and crumpled Kleenex’s in their hands. The young girl in front of him pulled the bud from her ear. Her gold hoop earring dangled in place. “She was an older woman, you see. Practically an old maid, my mother said. My father said she was