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[failure]

Hello, I'm stuck in an empty office w/ no work for the next six hours so I'm bringing back the old school Drabble meme.

1. Tag in
2. Leave prompts
3. Write

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Hyun and Rhea - ghost stories

[failure]

Even with the grey streaking through her hair, she still looked beautiful as she leaned forward, raising a finger. "Don't do any of that-- any of that Notebook stuff. No coming round to tell ghost stories. Nothing like that."

He takes her wrists and raises her hands up to his mouth, to press kisses against her knuckles with numb lips. He doesn't feel real. Nothing does; the outside world is just past this window and all the passers by are like actors in a bad tv show. Or maybe it's Hyun who's the centre of this show? Maybe everyone's the star of their own private show. Even him. "No ghost stories," he promises, she kisses his cheek.

They are at the kitchen table, the test results, leaflets from the doctor on the table between them. Outside is their front yard. Dirt, flowers, water from the Robinson's sprinklers. This is the world he knows, the world he can see and feel and fight and struggle with, the way he and Rhea struggled to keep those flowers healthy, every Sunday. You can fight the physical. "It'll be slow," she tells him gently, no big collapse. Just a slow eating away, a slow fade of thought and memory. In her eyes he can see the full weight of it lying on her shoulders, this injustice. He remembers her mentioning once, Iris Murdoch, another Oxford scholar, a genius by all accounts. "There'd be no point anyway," she tells him, trying to joke. "How am I supposed to understand the stories you tell when I start to forget what words mean?"

Hyun stands up to get a glass of water. "Everything'll be in here. Mateo, Jae, Gwen, your mother, the kids, me." He taps his chest above his heart, turns his back to open the tap. "They're all alive in here."

"But they'll be dead in my head," he hears her say, voice dull. When he turns, she's buried her head in her arms, her shoulders shaking.

The next day, he buys her a camera. Kodak ghosts and images burned into pixels to keep memory truthful just a little bit longer.