| She was washing dishes.
She felt sick. She sat down at the kitchen table.
Her mouth was swollen. She felt something in her throat.
She couldn’t swallow.
She put her fingers in her mouth. She began to peel off pieces of skin from the lining of her cheek, from the roof of her mouth, from underneath her tongue.
Each piece of skin was a word. They peeled away easily. She smoothed each word out onto the tabletop:
daughter
sister
mother
wife
lawyer
artist
friend
colleague
lover
Each word was translucent, pink with blood. They were all common nouns. They dried out quickly, shrinking and wrinkling up like tissue paper. They blew away.
She felt other words in her mouth. She winced as she removed them. She plucked each one out with a sense of obsession and relief and laid it on the table:
white
middle class
privileged
educated
intelligent
tactful
charming
proper
polite
professional
pragmatic
organized
efficient
articulate
competent
loving
giving
nurturing
sexy
feminine
These words were thicker. When they dried they became stiff and opaque like vellum. She noted that each word was an adjective. She gathered them up in alphabetical order.
She wiped off the table. She felt more words forming in her mouth, hardening, turning to lumps. They were leeches, blood soaked and swollen, embedded in her cheeks, her throat. She had to twist each one round before it would loosen. She persisted in spite of the pain. She dropped each word on the table:
lazy
indulgent
frivolous
fat
glutton
debtor
bitch
cunt
naive
impractical
crazy
frigid
whore
good girl
bad girl
guilty
fool
failure
selfish
slut
demanding
insatiable
cold
smothering
faithless
disloyal
consuming
humorless
bitter
irrational
hysterical
female
They were nouns and adjectives. She couldn’t order them. They clotted and stuck to the table. They stained the wood. She scraped them off and put them down the garbage disposal. Her mouth bled every time she opened it to speak. She tried to soothe it with tapioca pudding.
She felt sick to her stomach. She had to hold her knees to her chest. She felt a mass forming in her throat. She opened her mouth. It took both her hands to pull it all out. It smelled like feces, like vomit, like champagne, like semen. It was composed of words, each voicing itself at once.
She recognized some of the words: no, I can’t, I won’t, I want, I am. The mass of words pulsed and bled. She wrapped it in a towel and cradled it against her breast until it was quiet. Then she buried it in the garden, underneath the rose bushes.
She went back into the kitchen to do the dishes. Her throat was raw but she opened her mouth to try to speak. Her words were bubbles. They floated, expanded, enveloped her. She moved within them and through them:
woman
human
sentient
being
connection
time |