The Crocodile Lover

She said, 'Over my dead body,' and so they killed her. The soldiers carried her screaming and grasping at shirt collars, lapels, tablecloth, and hurled her out of the fifth-floor window, and because she was fat and asthmatic, she probably died before she hit the hard tar road in front of the hotel. This was five years ago and I was in America in my second year at NYU and so the story came to me in snippets, a casual line in an email, a paragraph online as I browsed through the home papers. My auntie's death was only referred to in passing by the papers, like a footnote to the lengthy columns about the famous general whose arrest she died trying to stop.