Stray whiskers

A bowl of stray whiskers, feline. I can’t decide if they are a collection or an offering.

Some are grey, a few silky black. Stiff and supple, they are little more than a short strand of hair. What sound did they make, piercing through air, touching down on the wooden floorboards?

I’ve heard a pin drop. I know how to keep quiet enough to listen for the myriad ways the world is falling all around us, always.

But a whisker dropping?

Is it strange to think that leaving this life may be no more than this, one more whisker going down? A music so brief and low, not even the mites, walking the unseen roads of the human face, hear it?

And God—who is it that holder of the bowl?