And this week's drabble.

breath.

I watched her die.

When I thought back, I assumed I’d just noticed later, after the fact. But I think I realize I was watching, and she died.

What I noticed was that she stopped breathing. That’s what I told the nurses. She’s not breathing. As though maybe that didn’t mean she was dead.

But how do you notice the absence of something? It’s not an action. It’s the long pause between when it should have come and when it didn’t. Doesn’t. Ever again.

So now I count breaths. I am afraid. Terrified. When the dog pauses between breath, sleeping. Or when my husband does.

Because the absence is that frail pause between is and isn’t.

Gorgeous, liese, both of them.

My husband will go as long as seven seconds between breaths when he's sleeping. Yes, I've timed it.

Those are all fantastic. I really got a sensory slap off Plei's line about being curled like a pillbug - that evoked a stab of memory for me, all by itself.

Mine. Some of you will know who the piano player was:

She Comes in Colours

Everytime I hear music, something opens in me and then closes.

Violin, the plaintive mourning of bow against strings, and I'm abruptly a child again, listening to scratchy tapes of my father, before diabetes took his music from him. It's a voice, that fiddle, calling me through sleep and down paths of memory.

Piano, a rich cascade of blues, boogie, tickling up the ivories, and suddenly I'm twenty again. The piano music is poignant to the edge of pain. It brings the beloved dead, the man I lost, through heart and soul and nerve endings.

All my music is prismatic.

Wow...I'm not sure I'll come up with anything, which, in its way, is better than following that.

But erika, you write beautifully about sense memory, damnit. Hell, I haven't beta'd a single piece of yours that didn't.

Deborah, I bought Robertson Davies' Murther and Walking Spirits yesterday. Have you read it?

Thank you! But now I have to write one.(I hate when the wife puts me on the spot in front of people. :))

PC, yup, and it's bloody brilliant (Davies may be the only writer out there who could pull it off properly), but we're in the wrong thread for that discussion: Great Write is strictly for original fiction. We need to take it over to Literary.

(I hate when the wife puts me on the spot in front of people. :))

Snerk. "But honey, you make the best meat loaf..."

Sigh. But this is the Last. Time. And you clean up.