Her words fall out of her mouth, collecting in a puddle on the dinner table. drip drip, from her lips to the surface a foot below. dripping can be sexy. watching the words drip drop on mute, one might be inclined to think they are speaking of passion, sultry beconings to come to bed. oh, dripping can be sexy. but not so, this time. people want to think that if you say something out loud, at some point the words will disappear; they will evaporate--or rather, sublimate. because words are solid at first, right? and they fall in chunks and then morph into the air through the process of sublimation. right? well instead, i argue that words are a particularly viscous liquid--a liquid that is slow to evaporate, that clings to itself tenderly and desperately. because words want to linger. no--linger is a lazy word. words want to . . . plant themselves--find a home in some container. this evening, they gather in his wine glass, cozied down in between the ethanol molecules. he is drinking a penfolds shiraz, best served at room temperature. but it is colder in the room than is optimal, and the words don't nestle in the alcohol quite as comfortably as he would like. he thinks: "a properly warmed red would smooth these words over, and a properly chilled white would numb them out of their conspicuousness." but this temperature is quite unfortunate. it's the optimal temperature for concentration, the kind that fine tunes your neurons. he knows what he has to do. he takes a sip, and then a gulp, of the tannic fluid. he's always been this way: slow to digest his food, and the words too. "what did she say? how did she put it?" and then he recalls. "i am . . . with child," were her exact words. her weighted diction was what made him pause, restraining the excitement that he would've shown under other circumstances--circumstances where her words didn't sound so thought out, so solemnly rehearsed and delivered, as though lines in a Shakespeare play. "she is with child." nothing more was said that night. the words had eroded a rift in the mahogany between them as significant in essence as the grand canyon. as his liver metabolised the alcohol, his deeper insides metabolised the words. "she is with child." it was understood now that the child was not his. he wondered where the words would go and how his body would handle them. he wondered if they would ever be completely filtered out of his system. would the words ever disappear?. |
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