This Tiny Breath

“Can you hear that?” I ask her, rolling over in bed.

“Hear what?” she replies, eyes all sleepy beauty, reflecting the dying flame of the still-burning candle in the window as it flickers and finally fades.

“Oh…why do you breathe like that?”

“Breathe like what?” she asks, sitting up.

“Tiny breaths, like you’re sipping on the air,”

We had just moved into the new place when I first heard it, and I was sure it was her.

Who else could it be? There’s only two of us in this little flat. As soon as I start to feel like I’m falling through the floor into sleep, this tiny breath visits our bedroom and hovers right near my left ear, the faintest whisper of life in my eardrum.

Even when we’ve got the fan on — it’s an unusually hot British summer — I can make it out.

She thinks I’m mental, of course, but I never hear it anywhere else. It’s only here in this little flat with it’s choking atmosphere and crushing walls and stained…

She’s starting to think I regret moving in. I tell her I don’t but the dark circles and the red veins and the descending cadence tell her not to believe me.

I’ll sleep soon.

It’s my turn to cook tonight.

I’m sweltering over the wok cooking a hoisin duck stir fry.

The packet of sauce was especially difficult to open and I lost my temper with it, tearing the thing in half with my hands and getting it all down the oven and in front of it on the white tiles of the floor.

I’m trying to scrub it off as she returns from taking the bins out.

“Oh,” she says, “don’t worry about that, those stains have always been there. They won’t come out.”

She finally tells me it’s been nearly a year, long enough to consider not renewing on this little flat and its tiny breath and moving somewhere bigger.

She wants kids, at least one, a little boy.

I do too, and this place is too small. Maybe we should go, we agree, deciding to sleep on it.

That night she hears it too, I’m sure of it, we don’t say anything, but we’re both twitching and trembling in the dark of the room, as the tiny breath lulls us into a shared dreamscape.

We had exactly the same dream. Only it wasn’t a dream.

A memory.

A sense-echo.

Something happened in this place.

We can see it clearly, a young father, drunk and cramped. An absent mother, and a sweet little boy.

Under three, I think, too young to understand what rage is. His black hair points sadly at the ground, matching his eyes.

He’s suffering. There used to be damp in this flat, affecting his lungs.

His breath, it’s loud. Rattles, like a few grains of rice in a tin can.

The father’s fingers clench around a near-empty tumbler.

Crackling, wet sound.

Soft, moan-like.

Then it happens, the boy is lifted by his arm which makes a wet slurp as the shoulder dislocates, and then another, awful breaking as his body slams against the oven door and hits the white tile of the kitchen floor with a sodden thud. A little multicoloured pool spills out underneath, and he tries to breathe just as quiet as he can before the end.

Like he’s sipping the air.

We’ve discussed it, and it’s the only thing to do.

He’s stuck, can’t move on.

Three is too young to become a ghost.

We’re both crying as we walk into the little kitchen and stand either side of the stain. We toast the boy — whom we name Archie — with the remainder of our gin.

She makes the move and I go to stop her, scared, but she looks at me with eyes full of tearful love — for me and for him, she’d always been selfless — and I quieten.

Slowly, but with steady hands that make me think about how much I didn't get to know her, she turns on the gas, and opens the oven door.

It’s not what we wanted, but we’ll get our little boy.