He. Rang. Her. Like. A. Bell.
She could feel herself coming in her throat, as if an orgasm could be sound, as if one could reach her insides without touching, by hypnotizing her through the rhythm of nonchalance.
He looked down at her.
Exhaustion. She had collapsed.
Every moment is (she paused, sighed, stared, licked her lips) EXPLODING, do you see?
She sunk into each drooling syllable, let them lick at her like a man performing cunnilingus. She fell between the spaces, the pores between letters, breathing in and out of them.
She thought of the texture of sound, a blanket made of baritone. She could wrap herself inside of it like a newborn, letting the words collapse like bodies of the same flesh.
She is deaf now. Mute. Lost. Disconnected. She swirled inwardly. She became drunk on spirals. She could think only of dervishes.
She thought of the way God created. In the beginning, there was The Word. They poured out of her like her own organs, the words, like sacks full of blood. They had grown their own spines, like bodies taken from the ribs of Adam. She counted the bulbous ends of bones like beads on a rosary, reciting poems of the holy fiction that consumed her. She tied the bones in knots and wrapped them around her neck and wrists and let them bangle, holding her down like a slave, because it is through words that we negate, and their absence that we fly away. They put us under a jar, but they also silence themselves, and we can see outside of them. For how could we move if there was no substance? I cannot surrender myself to that static void, she thought, to escape imperfection. I must indulge, fall.
She swung her body around from her torso, still latched on by the legs, and saucered him in a dance.
Let me kiss you from where they emerge, she whispered, that hollow cavern of echoes and dreams. Take me in with you, let me slide down your esophagus and speak to you from your own belly, from the inside out. Let me eat your liver and let it grow back in my own image. Let our speech intertwine like legs and flesh, our sentences fucking each other like snakes in an orgy.
He sings her to sleep. Rest now.
Silence.
She woke only to murmurs and the sound of feet running off a cliff. Both meant doom in their lulling suicide.
This time it was both. She couldn't tell if they were her own feet, or the feet of others. Her own murmurs, or the murmurs of others. They had lost distinction. She was dragging them or they were dragging her or both, a monster with a hundred legs, a human centipede.