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.

Now, honey, you know I always do the dishes....

These are fantastic. Really ripping.

Noodling around with my own ideas. Sense memory isn't one of my strong points in writing. It needs the exercise.