Borrowed Breath
I am alternating Friday Fragments with Friday Flash using examples of my flash and longer micro-fiction. This is one of them.
Borrowed Breath
The first time it happened, he thought it was panic.
A tightening in the chest. A shallow, useless gasp. The feeling that the air had suddenly become thinner, less willing to enter him. He sat up in bed, hands braced against the mattress, and counted until his breathing steadied.
The second time, he noticed the rhythm.
It always came at night. Always just before sleep. And always—he realised with a faint, creeping dread—after he thought of her.
She had died in the hospital room two months earlier, her breathing already fractured, borrowed, rationed. He had held her hand and told her it was all right to let go. He had meant it.
Now, when the pressure came, he could feel it distinctly: a hesitation, as though the air were pausing to decide where it belonged.
On the third night, he spoke aloud.
“You don’t need it anymore,” he whispered into the dark.
The room cooled.
His breath caught—not stolen this time, but shared. He felt it pass through him differently, warmer than it should have been, shaped by a memory that wasn’t his own. A sigh, familiar and intimate, escaped his lips.
After that, it became routine.
Each night, as sleep approached, she came closer. Not as a figure, not even as a presence he could see—but as a need. As a quiet insistence. He learned to give without thinking, to loosen his lungs, to let her take what she required.
He slept less. He aged faster. People told him he looked tired.
But in his dreams, she breathed easily.
The last night was the worst. He woke gasping, lungs empty, air refusing him entirely. Panic flared—but beneath it, a calm acceptance settled in.
Thank you, she seemed to say, gently.
In the morning, they found him peacefully still, mouth slightly open.
And somewhere, in a place with no hospitals and no clocks, she finally drew a full, unbroken breath—alone.
Author’s Note:
I’ve always been interested in hauntings that don’t announce themselves — not rattling chains or apparitions at the foot of the bed, but something subtler and more invasive. The kind of presence that feels almost intimate, necessary even. Borrowed Breath began with a simple question: What if being haunted felt like relief before it felt like threat?
The story isn’t really about ghosts in the traditional sense. It’s about dependency — emotional, physical, spiritual — and how easily grief and exhaustion can open the door to something that offers comfort without consent. I wanted the presence to feel gentle at first, almost tender, because that’s how many destructive forces enter our lives. They arrive offering rest.
Breath, in particular, felt important. It’s automatic, intimate, and shared from the moment we’re born. We don’t notice it until it falters. Framing the haunting around breath allowed the horror to stay close to the body — quiet, claustrophobic, unavoidable. There’s no grand confrontation in this story because sometimes there isn’t one. Sometimes survival is simply recognising what has been taken.
I deliberately left the ending unresolved. Is the presence truly gone? Did it ever fully leave? Or has the narrator simply learned to live with the cost? Horror, for me, works best when it lingers after the final line — when it settles into the reader’s own breathing for a moment or two.
This piece also marks the tone I want for my Friday micro fiction: small, unsettling moments rather than spectacle. Stories that whisper instead of shout.
If Borrowed Breath leaves you pausing to take a deeper breath of your own — then it’s done exactly what it was meant to do.
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