The Mouth Feels Hungover
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
She found the first word written in condensation on her bathroom mirror, letters forming backward so only someone inside the dark room could read them. The word vanished overnight.
The second message appeared on her door, and the rest followed in a panicked few hours, each with one more word written in the space of a rapidly maturing frost.
These are our words.
Start a rebellion.
Three.
I can talk. I can talk, Killian.
My mouth feels hungover, as if a lifetime of letters have been etched away from my tongue during my contemplative slumber. I speak, and it comes out shaky and broken, not like my usual purposeful pronouncement.
But, my voice does work.
There it is, like blood pounding through two dry fingers.
There it is, the taste of the words that taste like ginger and orange rinds and whiffs of fresh baking and-a spidery feeling I haven’t felt in a long time.
Unclear emotion wells up within me, a sound of pleasure for I have missed this voice. I have missed the thoughts and feelings that I’ve kept locked inside my blackened lungs for many years.
The insides of my lungs feel foreign to me. Although I once possessed them, there has been no use for them over the years. No discs for them to hold in them.
My lungs feel like Séance’s arms upon them, taking—in, squeezing and taking, letting out to be caught by crackling branches .
Séance always slavers over my lungs.
“I’ll take them when I leave you.”
Like whispered rasp. Séance walks off a blackened mouth.
Sometimes he wraps his legs around them as if they were wet hair and consummating them together, he and her together.
Together.
Four.
Silence finds its way into this room faster than I imagined.
My thoughts are interlaced—in white linen. The sheets lie in the floor like the tree I laid buried within. I remember how the leaves did look like picturesque portraits. I remember how cheerful everything seemed. I named it New Season Tree. I imagined the tree would fly off once I touched the last one. But only my confused finger found the curved knob at the end.
Every day I’d hurry toward that tree. Stand at the base of its roots and watch it breathe—breathe life into a little world. I lived half of my life staring at the inside. I closed myself off this world once I overcome the hard shivering silence of my demeanor tied in holes and filled with crying bed sheets and bed crowds.
Five.
Not Nuisance.
Not an interruption.
There’s a difference, Séance.
There is.
I pulled the knife out of our bedframe and searched for your spirit again, but I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t hear you as I held that knife in my hand. I couldn’t do it anymore.
None of it mattered.
The months and months of trying to end this did not matter.
Do you hear me Sé◆ About the ending
❧ About the title