‘Shush, I'm here.'
He's soaked through, and there’s that familiar dread: the pull to sleep fighting the duty to act. Duty wins, though anger at it makes her bite her lip and fist her hands; makes her still for seconds, deaf to his weeping. It's the third night in a row.
She switches on the lamp and a puddle of light shows his pale blank face. Bending to take his weight she slides and pulls him to the chair, then begins to strip the bed: the urine seems to be everywhere. Several times she stops to pat his shoulder.
‘Don't worry, we'll get you dry, won't we?'
The night gives her voice this new intonation. She can't help talking to him like he's a child.
One of their children.
Reels of memory begin to unspool before her. How they'd worked to change a wet bed together, each of them moving round the other in a dance, a song of whispers: I'll do that, you take her. Shush, we're here, let's get you dry.
Now she drops the bedclothes and kneels, resting her head on her husband's legs. He mutters and stretches his arms, still slim and firm. For a second, she thinks he will gather her into them, as he used to when they fell back into bed.
We're awake now, what shall we do?
She waits, knowing he is senseless of this history. But then his fingers are in her hair, twisting into the strands, remembering.
And she laughs, wide awake for this moment, this night.
Liv Norman is a short fiction writer living in Surrey with her husband and three children. Her flash, short stories and micro fiction have won or placed in competitions, and appeared in Splonk, NFFD Anthology, and Paragraph Planet among others. Best micro fiction nominee 2024.
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