1.
MY HUSBAND WAS SICK with Covid again, his third bout. He said the symptoms felt like a memory reawakening inside him, an echo that rolled through his body: the fever, the breathlessness. For the first two nights we slept separately, but I woke whenever he did – the creak of his bed, his long, ragged cough – and so on the third night I went back to him. Damp sheets and my husband twisting beneath them, crying out in the throes of a bad dream; but at some point the fever must have passed, because he rolled over onto his side in the darkness, facing the wall, and slept quietly.
When I opened my eyes the next morning he was awake already. My husband is so short-sighted that without glasses he can’t read the first line of an optician’s eye chart, that big single letter at the top. It’s a cliché, I know, how different he looks without them, a quality of nakedness in his expression, of vulnerability. His irises, which are brown, seem darker, with a liquidity to them, also a kind of opacity, which the glasses usually keep sheathed. That morning there was the usual puzzled expression in his eyes as he tried to focus on me. That look as though he was lost.
Good morning, beautiful, he said, my face just a blur to him probably, and this was how I knew that the fever was truly gone because these were the same words he had greeted me with
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Rebecca Burton’s novella, Ravenous Girls, was one of the two winners of the 20/40 Publishing Prize in 2023. Named one of the 25 Best Australian Books of 2023 by the Guardian Australia, it’s published by Finlay Lloyd Publishing. The author of two young adult novels and several anthologized or forthcoming short stories, she writes about books, birds and words at twenty-one-words.com and on IG (@twenty.one.words).