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Silence: She is smoking a cigarette, watching him lie there. He is breathing. She thinks he is breathing. She sits up in her chair and looks again, for the twentieth time at least. Yes, he is breathing. He is still face down, in the same position as yesterday. She caught a few hour's sleep on the couch. She did not want to be near him when he woke up. Not at that moment. That's also why she only slept for a few hours and not very well at that. She leaned over to the right and saw that the blood had dried. It had dried since yesterday and there was a small brown stain on the bedspread, near the back of his head. The cut had coagulated and it had started to scab over, but it was stretched over the swelled lump that was the point of contact. Around the cut the hair was matted and looked like some kind of fur or wig hair. She had washed the underside of the pan this morning, fried some eggs in it, washed it again, and put it away. She skipped lunch. There were some donuts, but she didn't want any. She wondered if he would ever wake up. Somehow it seemed inevitable. It just had not happened yet. He'd better get up. She dug a fingernail in between the curlers with her cigarette hand. There was no fucking way he was going to walk out in the middle of an argument just so he could get drunk and pass out on that good bedspread.