Cody stands there, staring at his parent’s scorched heads suspended upside down by the seatbelt from their bodies. His mouth is open with heavy breath pouring and slurping from it. His body quakes so intensely, that it makes him feel numb. A tear seeps out of his eye. He begins to weep, staring at his mom staring back at him. In an attempt to digest what he sees, he runs out towards the car.

The motel manager tries to stop him, but Michael runs into his arms, pushes them away. He keeps running, with Judy’s hand firmly wrapped in his. They sprint up to the car and stop just an inch shy of the door. Michael breaks the door window. Cody bends and looks in. Everything is in slow motion. Not a dust particle goes unnoticed.

Cody stares at his mom’s charred face as the glass crystals from the windows slowly fall, like leaves during spring. The blood too evaporated to bleed, steam coming off their flesh, leaving multiple patches of fizzing foam of the sickening reddish-brown on their burnt skin. Her face used to look beautiful, but now, it’s just a skull under the skin that looks like a black molten rubber cloak.

Michael unties Judith’s seatbelt, then just like a rock, she falls on her head and breaks her neck. Meanwhile, Cody sits there, looking through the smoke.

They all kneel in the middle of the road, next to the windows, for just above two hours.

“No one is here. And the manager wouldn’t give a damn,” says Michael. “No ambulance or cop is coming anytime soon. The least we can do is let them rest in peace properly.” “We need to have a burial.” Says Cody. “Let’s just call it a goodbye day. I hate the word ‘burial’.” Interrupts Judy.

As soon as Michael pulls her out of the window, Judy begins to do what roughly resembles CPR, on her dead mother’s burnt corpse. “Wake up, mommy!” She keeps screaming while pushing her chest.

Michael lays a soft hand on her shoulder and gently drains her hope of her playing skip rope with her mom or dad again.

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A few hours pass by. Maybe three. The sun is in the center of the sky, mannerlessly and very clearly glaring at the event, refusing to mind its own business. Crows start coming in one by one. They begin chipping at the charred, overcooked flesh.

Cody ‘shoo’s them away. Michael then gets up and says, “We can’t wait for help and just stand here, waiting for them to be picked apart by crows. Let’s take them to the beach nearby. We can have a Goodbye Day there, for them.”

Asking for the motel manager’s truck, Michael drives the bodies with Cody and Judy down to the shore, with the manager helping them. The bodies were blanketed by a blue plastic tarp.

They park on the soil, behind the cover of a tree and a bush, and step off the truck, onto their slow feet. Cody looks up, at the shore. No sand. But a short drop to the water. The shore looks as if it's floating. Blue skies, blue ocean, brown cliffs separating land from ocean. Just a few hundred meters off, circular islands on the face of the ocean. They look like doughnuts on the ocean. Large doughnuts. Just shy of two miles wide. Doughnuts with a million trees on the surface, leaving no gap between each tree. The spectacular color of dark forest green blissfully littered the top of the brown doughnut.

Soon, the grave is ready, thanks to the manager. Michael calls Cody over to say a few good words about her. They all gather around, and just stand there, not knowing what to say. The manager walks over to the pickup truck, leaving them some space.

The bushes blow and hiss in the wind, trying to fill the silence. The trees just stand there, dancing respectfully.

After heavy breathing and thinking, Cody found a few words to say. He says, “I really don’t know what to say. But that’s fine, I’ll let my heart speak out for now. Both of you were the best parents we could ever ask for. You taught me to be strong. But here I am, crying. Part of being strong is just facing events like these. I wish I could just go back in time and stop it from happening. If God did this, I wish I could stop him.”

And right then, Cody freezes. A flashback reverberates in his head. In the hospital, the doorstop moved first, then, the pen fell, pointing towards the doctor.

In Cody’s mind, that translated to…

“Stop him.”