|
Aphasia Bloom and The Vessel of Silence The sky blinks wrong. Once. Twice. Then stays unshut. It seems lower now, a ceiling of pressed ash. No one moves. Silence bites bone. Vess hangs in the humming field, attentive to splintered tenses, perception skipping in the mute bell ringing, ringing. Echoes of the inner haze refract and pulse outward, shadows tremble to the margins -- voices shrug in the space between stones. Silhouette ridges loom in the moonlight. A coyote rests in the stillness, sniffing wistfully in the wind for the way it was before. Grudge Geyser sprawls, tasting sound, absence pooling on his tongue, spitting sand like unborn languages. Aphasia Bloom flashes in the fracture slowly spreading out from Vess, growls like a sunbeam sparkling in cracked ice. Time creaks open, oozing sap. Perception seeps murkily back -- a chill crawls into thawing limbs. Grudge’s breath rasps with choked curses, whiskers damply twitching, gluttony glittering doomful in his gaze. His eyes find The Vessel, whose deep heart holds dark and silent, still suspended in the vibrating air. Aphasia sees his reedy limbs grappling greedily toward the shivering Vessel, tangled intentions urging him forward. She lurches, but barely moves. With every scream a new dimension folds. With every scream the vessel cracks. With every scream the silence darkens. Aphasia’s breath draws inward, a steady pull beneath gravity. She opens her mouth once more. In the shape of her breath space shatters -- a thin, volcanic mist of crackling flatness. Sand erupts, blood shimmers back of eyeballs, conscious thought knells into terrible clarity. Grudge collapses, muttering empty syllables, pierced by hundreds of tiny cactus thorns, snuffing his will til the whine subsides. Silence howls back in, trailing rupture. Coyote climbs into fading nightlines. The sky blinks again, backward. Twice. Once. Closed, unclosing. Shapes shudder out of rhythm. Thoughts in the grain of a weather-parched jawbone. Broken birdcalls catch in throatless wind. Terrain folds like scorched paper. Aphasia Bloom stands tilted -- breath without sound -- just a fresh hush of bone ash, settled where a voice once walked. Vess hangs suspended, ever farther away, dark heart dimmed, a skimmering projection of stilled pulse. Desert shadows shift. The hills race to catch up with the wind. Teeth seize behind still lips, grinding softly, softly. |