But the ache of memory doesn’t dull the pain of immediacy. She opens her eyes. Her instrument is gone. Turning away from her bandaged, mangled hand fails to make it whole again.

I have been there and done that (mine involved rebuilding seven of tem fingers and doing skin grafts), and boyoboyoboy, do I feel your pain. Brrr.

Two wonderful drabbles.

We have a coffeehouse on the Caltech campus called the Red Door Café. If I don't manage to work that in somehow, I'll be very sad.

You do more than I, deb, as my injury was utterly minor. Rendering that piece more fiction than not.

But fret hand injuries sure are scary, so I extrapolated the (thankfully unnecessary) fear.

You extrapolated well. There was desolation in that paragraph.

Thank you. It's terrifying to me.

We know a fellow, a programmer by trade and musician by heart, like us. He was sitting at his pc one day and lost his hearing completely in a span of about ten minutes. A virus or something, turns out. A writer friend of mine, mother of a close friend, is going blind.

Equally terrifying to me. To lose something so inherent to the artist's sensibilities. It's not just the injury or disease. It's the fear of loss of creativity.

Wrod.

Liese, I actually drabbled about my own injury, in an earlier drabble challenge.

It's scary stuff. I was purely a musician at the time and my hands weren't recognisable as such.

Yeah, I think I remember your other drabble. It's all so striking at such a basic level.

Nutty, Kaspar Hauser fascinates me. There are some brief samples of his writing in the book Lost Girls and Wild Boys (or a similar title; it's a recent book about feral children). There is some stiltedness and a few odd phrasiings, but it's hard to tell how much of it is due to the abuse and loss of language he suffered and how much of it is innate in writing translated from 19th-century German.

I have been entirely convinced he was a fake and entirely convinced his story was real, and am currently somewhere in the middle.

#16--Doors (doorways, door frames), red

She paid no attention to the lights that flashed their sequences, the ones that hadn't burned or shorted out. The helmet curtailed her peripheral vision, and as she passed, they ceased to exist anyway. The sound of her breath was all she could hear. The lights flashed silently. But the hatch hissed as its pneumatics worked, sluggishly, to lever it up. Instruments in her suit sampled, formulated, calculated. If she mixed suit air with the local, she might acclimate easier than gulping a full lungful when her oxygen ran out. Outside, her new horizon, under a red sky.