Melisa Miller, Week Four, Story Five

Talking It Up

The sound of the keyboard is toneless. It taps and rattles with the bouncing of the keys. Sometimes my face gets hot and my hands shake and all these sounds build up inside me and they have nowhere to go. I get a stomachache and a headache until I let the sounds go out my hands onto paper or a keyboard, but the pencil just swishes and the keyboard just taps. And when I have no paper I write with my fingernails on the walls or on the ground and they just scratch. So I close my eyes and I count to ten inside my head, hearing all the numbers one by one, until the pressure goes away.
What does it feel like to glide your tongue around in your mouth like a tiny ballerina at the ice capades? Those sounds that come out, the mmmm’s and the clicks and clacks and the round-abouts, they’re so clear inside my head.
I avoid the mall at all costs. The sound of people vomiting words all over the mall with its towering ceilings and its marble walls resonates while the tube in my neck drips chicken and potato smoothie. I always have to wipe it off my shirt. The trays in the food court clatter and the babies squeak while stroller wheels turn.
Pestilence. Legume. Cinematic. Catatonic.
Words sound different when you can see the eyes they are coming from. Sometimes they bulge out of sockets and glaze over as though they belong to an old blind man with glaucoma. Tongues trip and sounds spew all over the shiny mall floor. They get caught in hair, all over hands; they ooze down chins and onto necks. They flop into shopping bags and stain new clothes. It’s a filmy substance, talking. After it comes out it blocks thinking and doing from seeing each other.
I had a visitor to my home yesterday. He was middle-aged with dark crisp hair, dressed in a glossy charcoal suit. He talked for so long I stopped listening. I just watched his mouth as it bounced up and down with the rhythm of a rubber ball. He wanted to take pictures of my face. He kept saying “Ripley’s” and I gave him a note complimenting him on such a slippery word. After he left I added “Ripley’s” to my favorites list.
I’ve decided that if I could talk I would limit myself to one sentence per minute. One eloquent, sharp, poignant sentence.

“I would like a dinner roll, please.”
“I’m sorry; I thought that was my maroon jacket.”
“Can you tell me how to get to the nearest Starbucks coffee company?”

But mostly, if I could really talk, I would tell people to stop talking.