To Joyce:

She remembers being accused of showing doctored photographs and she laughs. There isn't anything you can do to a picture to make it close. No colour shifts, no dodging nor burning can tell you how warm it is, or how cool, or how clear and sparkling and everchanging.

There's no breeze in a photograph, no bracing smell, no calming noises. Fish can't nibble your back then scatter in shards of light. The sand can't spill through your toes.

He tilts the catamaran, and she laughs, dipping her head back into the crystal spray.

Blue is merely where the Caribbean starts.

God are these drabbles good this week. Seriously, folks.

ita has me remebering scuba diving off Grand Bahama, and Montserrat before the volcano blew, when Air Studios wasn't buried under thirty feet of ash.

Damn it.

An attempt to drabble....

I almost have my father's eyes. The shape is there, the dark clarity, and the way they're set into a prominent bone structure. Even the nearsightedness--that comes from him.

But not the color. I am not blue-eyed. Specifically, I do not have eyes of a near-sapphire hue rarely seen outside of Mary Sue fanfic.

Yesterday my daughter's eyes, which had lingered in indistinct newborn gray for nearly two months, suddenly began to well up with brown. She will have lovely eyes. But now I know they won't be my father's.

I think know when I got this one. It might have been that right hook in the second round, if it skipped off my orbital bone on the way to my nose. He apologized profusely for his sloppiness, but knowing I only had twenty seconds more sparring before the nosebleed became problematic meant any forgiveness would need to wait until after I'd kicked his ass.

I thought no more of it, dabbing my nose by rote while I watched the lucky non-bleeders keep fighting, until the wiseass yelled from the door.

"Makeup again?"

Closest to blue eyeshadow I ever get.

ita, good one. But there's a missing word, alas:

if it skipped off my orbital bone as it on the way to my nose.

as it what on the way to your nose?

Actually, it's not a missing word, so much as two unremoved ones.

Will edit.

Thankee, ma'am.

Because yours are smoothly crafted enough so that a hiccough makes me blink.

Blue is merely where the Caribbean starts.

I will use this line as a jumping-off point for a little anecdote in which I am a freaking idiot. I saw the theme and was thinking, "Man, I just saw some gorgeous aqua water. That would be cool. Where was that, again?" Oh, right. Off Greece/Troy. At the movies. Der.

Whenever I see shows set in Greece, my mind always insists that they're using some sort of filter, because no water could possibly be that blue in truth. Never having been and being unlikely to ever see Greece, are the pictures true?