afterimage ovenbird As I was settling myself down to sleep I pressed the heels of my hands into my closed eyelids, hoping to encourage reluctant moisture to seep from the sand and relieve the ocular drought that plagues me. Instead the pressure wrung an image from my brain and it splashed against the screen stretched over my eyes, brief as lightning but terrifyingly vivid: a woman, old and cratered, sparse hair a wild tangle, her eyes sewn shut with thick black thread, her mouth a hungry red cave devoid of teeth. She was there and then gone in less than a second and I wondered what light I had turned my face towards that could produce such a monstrous after image. What hell sent sun shines on my face? What beast have I disturbed? 251102 what's it to you? who go blather from