I asked him why is this happening. he told me that’s just the peppermeat. he is still slicing thick slabs of her strange golden flesh that curl down over the table. I can feel it’s changing the way I am inside, rearranging me, but I cannot tell what it will make of me.
I wake myself up with the sound of a harmonica, disoriented, I take a deep breath. my chest sings. inside the labyrinth of my diaphragm things are separating and fusing I can feel them–crawling in slow motion in the way of twisting rivulets of water on a boilpot lid. I want to throw up. I don’t know where it would come out.
the phone cleaves to my ear, to the curve of my neck, and I ask him again. he does not hear me but he laughed wild delighted and said I was changing into something else. you have a purpose now he murmured into the phone as if he was trying to eat it, press his mouth against it and fuse it into himself. I did not ask him what that purpose was but he breathed it into me. to sing without ceasing. to scream without ceasing. my breath wheezes through my throats I am trying not to cry.
his door opens to me without my pushing it. in my second throat I grind a stream of prayers, under I tremble him a hello. he beams at me and stands aside to draw me in, as a breath. I am sitting on the tall chair at his counter he has placed my hand on a sheet of paper.
I stared at it he pressed down one finger. a vivid bruise.
the skin broke easily, like a ripe peach; gold ink smeared a trail after my hand as he dragged it, thick acrylic paint and I snatched my hand back. I tried to clutch it to my chest, but it pulped between my fingers.
I am staring outside through swollen eyes trying not to make a sound. I am trying not to think of anything at all, for fear.
a bird slams against the window and I jerk back sudden–leaves a ghost of itself on the glass and a red bloody little body on the ground outside for the cats. out of my chest bubbles up the beginning of a wail. I clamp my left hand over my mouth and whimper into it. is it mourning or excitement? another pair of lungs draws breath, cutting-air through the holes below my ribs, and another throat begins to sing.
the force of the scream beneath my hand disintegrates it. slowly drips down my front. by then I was song only, screaming only, until the foundations of the house shook apart and my throats were open to the deep endless sky.