1.
Close your eyes, she murmured as her fingers brushed his temple. He exhaled forcefully, his breath rushing from his lungs joining the musky air. You work too hard and think too much, she told him, just stop. She was right, but then again, she always was. From the moment they met, three months ago, there was a connection to her he had never felt with anyone else. Maybe it was the way she could bring him to calm with the lightest touch. Perhaps it was the pitch of her laugh, the kind that made you want to spend the day trying to make her do it again. Or it could be how her blue eyes lit up when she saw you enter a room. In the silence between them now, he tried to focus on clearing his mind of everything but found he couldn’t, not with her stretched on the bed next to him. His chest inflated as he drew in a deep breath, and her palm came to rest on his sternum, a radiating heat stretching from her skin across his body. A lightness came about him as he imagined his mind miraculously healed.
2.
The baby fell asleep so quickly she was sure he was dead. Holding her finger under his nose, she did confirm that he was, in fact, alive. More than two hours of walking the floor in the night, quietly praying the newborn would fall asleep. After the first hour, she started to shed as many tears as the tiny bundle in her arms. Somewhere during hour number two, she contemplated placing him on the floor and just walking away. But in the end, she held on, pulling his squishy body closer to hers, desperately clinging to him as if they were dangling from a single strand of rope and she was his only protection from falling. Now, in the silence, she still hung on.
3.
Standing in the forest, he gazed up towards the tops of the trees as they swayed in the wind – the peaks bending to and fro, giving the illusion he was moving even though his feet were firmly planted on the mossy ground. There was something eerie about the rustling in what should be silence. The highway was an hour’s hike back and he had more than an hour to go before he pitched his small tent near the water. The good fishing spot was right near there, he could tell by the amount of bear scat he encountered — man and beast after the same outcome, but with two different approaches. Last year, a bear came sniffing around his tent in the night, but quickly moved on when he realized fish was tastier than man — this year, who was to say what would happen.
(c) Elvira Berezowsky
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