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.

Good one, Beverly. Mine's girly, this time.
The doorway isn’t wide enough for both of us to be in the bathroom at once. And, even though we’re both going out tonight, she’s first. She always is. She’s like...the alpha, or something.
I stop myself from picturing some British commentator narrating the social structure of homo sapiens cripplensis , with some difficulty, considering all the anthro this semester.(We’re still working on the tool use thing. In a pinch, you can capture an errant birth control pill with a spoon though. I think that counts.)
Not that the less dominant female doesn’t have her uses. Stephanie turns her freshly lipsticked mouth to me. “Ok?” she says.

Like I know. “Um, too red.”

She blots, puts on the pink one
. “Go like that,” I say, smacking my own bare lips together in what suddenly feels like a provocative gesture. I’d never really noticed before, and I’ve been messing with makeup since I was twelve.

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

Kaspar Hauser is an entertaining case -- lots of details, but still not quite enough for definitive answers about what afflicted him. (Which is why I like to make him all articulate, and also because letters from someone with a major language disorder can be kind of hard to follow.) As Deb noted, it's now been reasonably established, via DNA, that he was the heir of the house of Baden, and a lot of the activity of his benefactors implies that plenty of people knew it at the time.

it's now been reasonably established, via DNA, that he was the heir of the house of Baden

Ah, I hadn't read that. Off to Google...