My voice is thicker than my blood and pumps through my lungs just to breathe, just to reach up to gasp and scream like a hand being thrown into the sky.

And I have silenced it. I have ceased to speak, to write, to live. I’ve thrown a dagger into that hand and sent it curling down into a crumpled mess, a pool of vomit sinking into black sand. It screeched like steamed water as it descended, taking that great leap of faith, which is coincidentally the same gesture as the fall from grace.

There was no burial, there was only the great decomposition which I could not afford to watch, time’s visual act of reincarnation.

It haunted me during the night. I would wake up coughing up ink and feathers. The spinning wheel would spit up paragraphs and phrases all night until they all ran together and said essentially nothing and all I could hear was the insane murmuring of inanimate objects.