The hush itching at my inner ear crawls across the side of my neck, in between my teeth. I would close my eyes to focus on it, but I don’t want to taste the scene painted in blood and gore behind my eyelids.
“Say it again,” Zakiyah tells me. “See it again.”
My night light shifts through shades of ROYGBIV, waxing and waning through a spectrum of warm glow and cool shadow. I focus on that, and the clicking sound of my breathing eases as the back of my throat relaxes.
“Is this a memory?” I ask.
“Does it taste like one?”
My tongue curls at copper, mouth watering as my molars catch the meat of my left cheek. It’s the smell that’s strongest, but that and taste end up being the same thing most days. Something sultry, like cornfields in summer humidity. A muggy green laced with gold dust. Ultra rich. Overripe. Tangy-laced, like half-rancid table butter tasted right after a bite of what otherwise would’ve been cornbread so good it made you stomp your feet.
I can’t say all of that, but I can see it. I can taste it. Zakiyah’s hands on either side of my face feel like my own, and I swallow back the nostalgia from my father’s childhood memories. The shadows swim around the room and when I breath in through my mouth, slow and steady, the air hints at rain.
I’m glad for that, because seeing the sun too soon after the kind of dream I just had would be too much. A few hours of clouds would insulate my mind, giving me a chance to digest things piece by piece instead of regurgitating them at random throughout the day, choking on acidic chunks of truths I’m not ready to understand.
I usually try to clear my mind and focus on nothing at all, right after waking up from one of these. Dream, memory, vision—all words that I toss around in my head, in case anyone asks me or I find myself willing to talk a little about why I’m so out of sorts. But all of those are incomplete, and don’t quite get at the real thing that’s happening.
Possession conveys the invasive nature of the experience. There’s something about the way the memory of it skitters across my skin like a critter, a creature-version of whatever psychic/cosmic echo I keep getting webbed up in. Some kind of holy summons. A divine commandment demanding my very breath. The consummate calling that fills and feeds, leaving me failing and fallen. Empty.
“I don’t know what I am.”
My voice comes out hoarse, as if I haven’t spoken in years. As if I have waited centuries to confess that honesty. As if it comes from the mouth of my here and now that remains eternally blurry.
“I don’t know where I am.”
It is more a thought than a sound. My lips move and my lungs struggle with shuffling the air around.
“Do you see it yet?” Zakiyah asks. “Start from the beginning.”
I am the little girl who wakes with slime on her tongue and a soft but muscular something in the back of her mouth. A bit like a boiled egg, but firmer and larger. A massive contraction in my abdomen pulls me upright, expelling an eye from between my slick lips. It’s too big to be a human eye, because it’s the size of a grapefruit. The taste in my mouth is sharp but not sweet.
I cradle this warm, wet gift against my navel. When I breathe in, something between a hum and a vibration tickles my stomach but I can’t tell which side of my skin it’s coming from. One of my parents comes to my room, reminds me to eat breakfast and be ready to leave for school on time. I look at them, watch their mouth move, and nod. Their eyes do not meet mine, and neither do my teachers’.
During the school day, glances skim over my braids and graze the baby hair that never lies down. My teachers and guidance counselors are always watching me out of the corner of their eye, wondering why I seem antsy and calm, intensely quiet, urgently attending scenes on the whiteboards they can’t see. I don’t know if I mean to make them nervous, and I don’t know if I can help it, but I can’t focus enough to care. How could I, when there is something both birthed and buried in me?
I carry this all day with invisible hands that hug the stomach I should be allowed to love. My other parent works an hour away, so I’m never picked up before the other kids. I could say I have two and a half hours before I am expected to be conversational. In truth, I’m not sure I’m expected to do much of anything, other than my homework. So I do, in the fifteen minutes it takes me to finish my last few worksheets.
And then I disappear.
The old woman’s abode is made of stone and straw. Heavy log-beams slant away from the front, where the door is smaller than one would expect. The window above it belongs to a second story that is more like a crawlspace. The old woman has white hair, crooked fingers, dry skin. Her bad hip switches depending on morning. Noon, and night of any given day of the week. She has no children and is everyone’s grandmother.
Her chin juts out as she looks me over while I stand in the doorway. She lets out of a hmph and directs me inside with a click of her tongue, as if she were guiding a horse. I’m not spooked that easily. I follow the old woman inside and stand in front of the fireplace, ready to be examined.
I don’t look her in the eye, but I watch her face as she squints at my sternum. She leans on an old staff, sizing up my body, seeing all the tender cuts easily fileted from my ribs. I don’t feel small under her gaze.
“It came like that?” she asks, her chin wagging to my stomach.
My biceps should ache from cradling this all day. My fingers should tingle and twitch from restricted blood flow. I remember the feeling in my neck, like someone shoving something up my throat and out of my mouth without warning. Could you choke from the inside out? My stomach tightens with the memory of that first gagged contraction and I remind myself to breathe.
Instead of answering the old woman out loud, I meet her eyes and nod. She looks away from me, but not in fear. There’s business to attend to. Her staff raps against the floor as she thinks over her options, half-impatient little taps that make it look like she’s trying to climb up a tree.
“You know where it goes?”
The old woman asks it like a warning and my stomach tightens again.
“Not back inside me.”
It comes out as a whimpered plea, but it’s the truth. My body won’t take this back—not the way it came, anyway. The old woman seems satisfied, but I don’t think it’s because of my answer. She seems to think I’ll be able to handle whatever is required of me. If she feels bad about it, it doesn’t show. I don’t know if I would want her pity.
“You held it there all day?”
I don’t look down at it. I’ve avoided looking at it ever since it came out of me, but I can feel it the same way the shack’s cinnamon-scented air stings the back of my throat when I inhale. The weight that settles into my shoulders when I breathe out keeps me steady.
“I can’t let it go.”
She grunts like she’d expected as much.
“Hold still,” she says, turning away. “Hold it a while still.”
V. H. King's Ink 
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