If one can say of breath that it is well-articulated, like a word when it is pronounced with clear diction, then what I heard in my ear, as if someone were leaning over it after I had been lying awake for quite some time, waiting for the sun to come up, was a single, well-articulated exhalation. I could almost recognize the sound of voice that seemed to reside in the breath's inaudible wake. Yet there was no word; only a fleeting presence, overheard, intimately sensed, and inexplicably absent.