"He never slept, never stopped.       

          He must have known even then. A fortune-teller warned him he'd die young. Told me I'd have at least three husbands. We were just married. We laughed at it on the stairs. I remember coming out of her place. He said: 'You see, you'd better take good care of me.' It was just a joke to us. I wonder if he remembered. I think he mentioned it once. He made damn sure she was right though. Tobacco and drink, never no to work, never no to travel, never no to entertaining. Time off was for theatres and golf. No to rest... that was the only no. I got mad when he died, when I realized, after the shock. I yelled at him night-times, let him know, even if he wasn't there. How he left me with children, how he left me alone. He ran himself silly, ran himself right underground."

 

An eavesdropper stepped away from the door.   

        She had heard enough to have a sting in her eyes, to want shelter from her mother's words. Her exhalations tasted bitter. There was an insipid little knock in her ears. The girl had seen something like her father that morning, had not observed him precisely, but had known that he was about. She had stumbled against a rock, inadvertently tripped over it in a garden square. She had walked off straight away and hadn't gone ten measures before banging up against it again, as if having wandered in a circle. She had looked around to retrieve her bearings, then had inspected the stone. It had been no more than that: an insignificant monolith with bulges on the sides like little buds for wings or for ears. There, in front of the inanimate, mineral chunk, she had recovered his presence, his scratchy face, giant hands, nostrils big and black on the end of his nose.

 

"Where have you been all this time?"

        she had asked. No answer had come, but he had been there all the same. "You've been far away, busy with something else, even while you've been dead." Nothing further had transpired save the grasses scratching at her legs. She would go again to that rock; it would be her turn to shout. She must have seemed a young, troubled soul, ranting aloud in the park. She berated him, reviled his inattention, railed against his callous submission to the devilish prophecies of some broken old witch. At spleen's end, she huddled on the ground.

 

 

     "What will happen to me?" she whispered.

"You decide," came back. She lifted her head. "You needn't listen.

        "To what?"

"Borrowed breath. Predictions have no other."    

    "What about you?"

"I'm only talk. Hear me if you wish."      

    "No, no more." When she returned to the park, the stone had been removed. It had served in the building of a wall. Any other purpose for it long had been mortared over.