|
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. The silence grows teeth. Vess hangs in the humming field, attentive to splintered tenses, perception skipping in the silent bell ringing, ringing. Echoes of the inner haze refract and pulse outward, shadows tremble to the margins -- voices shrug at the edge of cognition. Silhouette ridges loom in the moonlight. A coyote rests in the stillness, wishing wistfully on 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, glows like a sunbeam sparkling in cracked ice. Time creaks open, oozing sap. Perception seeps murkily back -- ice crawls into thawing limbs. Grudge’s breath rasps with choked curses, whiskers damply twitching, greed glittering darkly 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 silent pull beneath gravity. She opens her mouth once more. In the shape of her breath space shatters -- thin, volcanic, existential. Sand erupts, blood shimmers back of eyeballs, conscious thought cracks 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. The sky blinks again, backward. Twice. Once. Closed, unclosing. Shapes shudder out of rhythm -- broken birdcalls caught in throatless wind, shadows folding like scorched paper, thoughts in the grain of a weather-parched jawbone. 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 trembling shadow nested in stilled pulse. Desert shadows shift. The hills race to catch up with the wind. Teeth seize behind still lips, grinding softly, softly. |