A Third Mouth
Kayla Eason
You’re waking because her heart murmurs.
She’s moving residually, the excess of unconscious brain activity come alive—jilts, tremors, her breath flexing inside your nose—as she sleeps. The murmur insisting from inside her. Hidden anatomic shapes all too pronounced in the dark.
You roll her over, smother the sound. Close her as a shell, facing away. Some minutes pass. You’re waiting for sleep to take you. And as you slip--there, again, you hear it, again, and again.
It’s not her fault, but you can’t stand it. The sound, subterranean. A burp, moist and cloud-like, as if she’d eaten cotton.
You will go mad if you stay, so you rise. It’s nearly 4 am. You’ve mentioned it to her in the past. The noise. The fact that you can hear it, but she insists that a person cannot hear a heart murmur, even the person’s whose heart is murmuring. But she should know, when you live with someone long enough, you hear everything: each glance, each release, each fluctuation.
In the living room, the night fizzes. Fluorescent black of early morning emitting green. Your furniture and floorboards and books all colorless. Stillness becomes the room’s scent. A home always appears foreign in this blank state, dressed in such early hours. And so you allow the feeling to wash over you, that you are walking into the living room for the first time. Your body rocking though you have not told it to. Your body is no one in particular right now.
You move into the kitchen, cold with its linoleum, stainless steel, fake granite. You open the cabinets just to look, not sure what you want. Popcorn, dark chocolate, Poptarts. But the Poptarts box is empty.
Each morning, you both have noticed the absent pieces of food. A bagel gone when you could have sworn there had been five accounted for yesterday morning. A Diet Coke consumed, though there was no sign of the empty can. Garlic rosemary hummus, a quarter swiped. A block of Dill Havarti thinner.
Before you lived with her, you were a binge eater. Mindless consumption. Salivating for the intricacies which create volume. Skinned, fleshy blocks of cheese. Spongey breads. Chips, anything salted, like a chemical fire cracking on the tongue, swallowing, mashing volume into exercisable shame, more and more, until your body is not a body anymore, but a disposal, a pit divulging the center of the earth. How each time you had pushed yourself too far, the desire to change felt unprecedented, and you had wondered—maybe it wasn’t food you were addicted to, but the need to start over the next day, promising yourself to be better.
Is she eating when you aren’t looking? And she wonders, are you?
You don’t over-eat now. You take care of yourself regularly—save for indulging here and there, but always in her presence. If you want pizza, you order it for the two of you, and you only eat one slice too many, bemoaning the stomach ache, sharing smiles in the normal way people do when they treat themselves.
Always in her presence.
So, you think, the missing food must be inside of her. But each time you bring it up—several times in the past couple months—she acts confused. It’s not her. She didn’t have the snack. She wasn’t home then. She doesn’t really like that food in the first place.
So it must be you.
But it isn’t.
Then, a burglar. A ghost. Something that hungers.
The insatiate struggles, taking from others.
You’re more inclined to believe that you’re both just forgetful. She, a school teacher. You, a project manager at a construction company. Two people bogged down by expectations of others, the calculations, the bills, the assessments of values. Her third graders all addicted to YouTube, though they can’t spell friend. You, hired to approach projects through more innovative means—how can time be managed in a more inclusive way? How can guesswork be eliminated? How can effective communication be reinvented?
You both return home like zombies, maybe snack more than either of you realize. You know how it is. How if you live long enough with someone, your basic motions begin to smudge imprecisely. The two of you stealing quiet in your own head. Enough stolen moments strung together to create blank gaps in the day’s reel.
You’re not present. You’re not listening.
But shouldn’t you be able to zone out now and then?
You grab a bag of BBQ chips from the pantry and sit on the couch with your laptop. Sometimes you think you hear the murmur, even though your bodies are separated by plywood and sheetrock and plaster, even if she is on the other side of town, even if she is visiting family from out of state. The swishing murmur trails your swallow, and you emerge from some trance nearly choking—the thought of air bubbling in her blood rattles you because you think you can feel it, her heart, muscling along. Your depository beating.
You begin stuffing the chips down your throat. Smoky flavor, vinegar but sweet. Gaseous, spreading into you. Slowly, you feel your mind dilute and you begin browsing the internet until you find the profile of that girl, the one you met when you were younger, before you met the other girl who now sleeps upstairs.
Sometimes you like to look at this girl online, the one from Berlin. You remember her: in one fist, raw cabbage, in the other, juice box wine. She wore tights and an oversized NYU sweatshirt, though she didn’t go to school there and had never been to the States. Her hair brushed to appear like water. She had said she could see all your tricks: body spray, teeth whitening, waxed unibrow. She had said she could see your chaos hemorrhaging.
Hemorrhaging.
You liked the gross exaggeration because it wasn’t one. It was true. Very often, you felt just that way.
“Everyone does,” she’d said. “And if they pretend otherwise, they’re lying.”
You’d crossed paths in Prague. Stayed up all night talking on the St. Charles bridge with its spectral lace of saint sculptures, mist dissolving the old city centre and streetlights breathing on the river’s surface.
Though you met her years ago and had only been together that one night, you can still instantly transport yourself to the moment: your body dead with absinth, and her hair running through your fingers. The world painted like wet stone. Her presence and the sky indiscernible.
You regret not following her to Venice. She had asked. But you had other plans. Friends to meet in Bucharest. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.
That girl now lives in New York with her partner. They seem to coexist happily, fill their space with small pieces of art. Their apartment has brick walls and lots of sunlight. There are plants, and produce is kept in baskets on the kitchen table. And though you’ve never seen a picture of the person she lives with, the omission doesn’t suggest disharmony, it communicates a sense of comfort. Substance worth keeping a secret.
The laptop screen has begun to blind you.
Each one of your fingers now caked in red artificial flavoring. The chip bag defeated.
Morning has begun to burn, and your limbs seem to weigh twice as much. You delete your browser history, shut the computer and walk to the refrigerator. Sure enough, some of the Thai leftovers are gone. Barely a bite or two of pineapple fried rice remains.
You wash your hands and walk back to bed. As you pass through the living room, it all feels so blaringly familiar. In the bedroom, you crawl beside her as quietly as if it weren’t a physical act, but a memory.
The sudden appearance of your body causes hers to find you, and she attaches her head to your ribs, lays her arms across your stomach. Her warmth emanating like a storm, catching you, entering you, sounding against your own rhythm. You recognize the scent of her sweat, clay-like. She doesn’t know that she clings to you, as she rests far away in sleep, but she does so as if the act were as natural as extending a muscle, as natural as catching yourself when you fall.
The sun pulls the darkness back into its mouth.
You begin breathing in sync with her.
Sometimes you do this on purpose.
Sometimes, the synchronicity just happens.
It happens as it did then. It happens as it does now. And it happens as it will tomorrow, which has already emerged bearing quiet alterity. So holding her, you wait in silence for the right minute to wake.
*
Kayla Eason is a writer and photographer based in San Diego, CA. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from San Francisco State University. Her first novel, Mia, is forthcoming from Orson's Publishing in spring 2020. Visit her at kaylaeason.com.
*