Cameo by K.L. Sullivan Isacson

She often thought that to be absolved into obliviously bright light or perfect, obsidian black would be her idea of both heaven and hell. Unlike most people she knew, she thought of them as nearly the same. To her, they were as inseparable as inhaling and exhaling. If death is the absence of breath, then, she weighed, what comes beyond that must be the terrible, sweet ache of lightheadedness. The pictures on her walls were nearly as blank as the paint. One favorite, a photograph entitled Weather Conditions, Antarctica, was a blur of white with wisps of snow streaks along the bottom that seemed to slip under the frame. She herself appeared to be a fragmentary vision that hung in doorways and whose only noise was a peripheral voice in conversation. All her life, she was a silhouette whose absence of form solidly neglected to take shape. When she paled and greyed herself, she thought life was the borrowed brightness of the moon and that death was the darkness behind it. Then she hoped that it was more like a velvet curtain full with soft bosom folds and that death was the person you most loved, visibly hiding behind them, revealed by familiar, telltale shoes. As her breath became fainter than her failing voice, she clung to the fabric on her daughter's chest, turning, pressing her face to one side. Copyright © 1999 K.L. Sullivan Isacson All Rights Reserved