This post was written in response to Reena’s Xploration Challenge. This week, Reena has given us a sentence to act as a thought-starter and wants to see where it takes us:
“A thought brushed my palm, then scattered like a startled bird.”
The desk lamp pooled yellow over a neat pile of stationery. Alan sat — sixty-eight, shoulders narrowed by years of careful living — and smoothed a sheet with trembling fingers. The ballpoint pen clicked, then slid. Cursive that had once been effortless came now in small, deliberate strokes. He began the letter to Martin, his oldest friend, a companion of fished mornings and wartime jokes, the keeper of names and shared embarrassments.
For a long moment memory supplied the stream: the smell of sawdust from their childhood garage, Martin’s laugh after a failed date, the map of roads they’d driven deep into the night.
Then, mid-sentence, his mind fell silent.
Words dissolved. A thought — sharp and intimate — brushed his palm, then scattered like a startled bird. He sat very still, watching blankness where memory should have been, and felt a childish panic rise.
He clicked the pen closed and open again several times and, with a steadiness he summoned from habit, wrote the admission he feared most. Alan told his old friend that he worried he was losing himself, that he was experiencing the early fog of dementia. In the letter, he asked his friend to give him a call, hoping a friend’s voice might steady what wavered.
Alan folded the letter with care, placed it in the envelope, and addressed it to Martin. At least he could still remember Martin’s address.
The lamp hummed. Outside, a single gull argued with the dark. Instead, Alan started to cry, wondering how much longer he would be able to be who he was.
Facts, Fictions & Fantasies 