Scattered Reflections

The world had fragmented around Edna, breaking apart without sound, without warning. There was no remembering anymore—only the sensation of reaching for something solid and closing her hand around nothing at all. Memories didn’t fade politely; they shattered, sharp and sudden, like glass dropped onto stone.

She felt them underfoot in her mind.

Gone like broken glass—her days lay scattered everywhere, each one catching light at the wrong angle. A childhood morning glinted beside a hospital hallway. A wedding vow reflected against a diner booth that never existed. A rainy dusk shared space with a summer field. None of them fit together. None of them could be reassembled.

Time no longer flowed; it refracted.

Colors bled into one another—reds from passing taillights smeared into the warmth of barn doors, blues from evening rain soaked into the sky of her youth. Each memory bent and split, casting duplicates that confused her. She saw herself as a girl and an old woman at once, running and sitting, living and leaving.

Edna tried to gather the pieces.

She reached for a shard that looked like Henry’s face, but it cut her—sharp with guilt, love, and regret all at once. She dropped it. Another fragment flashed: her mother calling her in to supper. It shimmered beautifully, then slipped through her fingers before she could hold it long enough to believe it.

“I’m still here,” she thought. Or maybe she said it aloud. She wasn’t sure anymore.

Her sense of self had come apart too. The woman who loved, the artist who created, the child who believed the world was endless—each existed in isolation now, unmoored from the others. She could feel herself disassembling, piece by piece, like a machine taken apart without instructions, screws rolling away into dark corners she could no longer reach.

She sat hunched and quiet in the failing light, her body heavy, her mind thin as paper. The storm inside her showed no mercy. Each moment stripped something away—names, faces, meaning—until all that remained was sensation without context.

Sound without source.
Emotion without memory.
Presence without identity.

The world shimmered in fractured color around her, beautiful and cruel in equal measure. And Edna, once whole, once certain, now existed as scattered reflections—alive in pieces, but no longer assembled into one.