Wendy's Room

If sleep, a noise could reach in. Drag you out. Not sleep. No noise. No silence even. All walls sealed. Unconsciousness — the word she couldn’t think of twelve years ago. Except here she was. The mind watching itself. And wasn’t that the definition of consciousness? An ultramarine impasto. As if she knew brushstrokes. Odd, because in this life, Wendy Kochman had been an amateur violist. A failed academic and a mother. Never a painter.

- Rebecca Berg

She’d been here before, a place of still images. All in blues and purples. Trees, walls, vines. Emily playing the violin, elbow cocked. Benjy streaking by on his bike. Flowers with gargoyle faces. Each preoccupation inhabited its own cool plane.

Like a cubist painting, she’d told people after the last time.

Like a window, a shattered window, an irregular starburst of cobalt and violet. The pattern was familiar, and not just because she’d been here before. She could see that now. See was the right word. There was no sound, touch, taste, or smell in this place.