Talk Vomit

By Thora Dahlke

Carmen walked like the gods had handpicked her for something special, something the rest of us wouldn’t understand, and maybe they had, maybe that’s why she survived when the sky zapped her seven-year-old body with lightning, her skin forever tattooed with pink mycelium. I wanted to thumb the pinkest parts of her but wondered if the electricity still hummed inside her, pictured my body detonated by touch. I saw my heart fragmented like a Greek poem, my blood and innards splashed in grimy bits all over the car park, and didn’t want to commit suicide that way. If anyone were to explode here, I wanted it to be Carmen. I wanted to unsheathe her bottom-most vertebra and watch her spine avalanche, wanted to perforate the bone, thread fishing line through it, and carry it around my neck. See how she’d sway her hips then. See how she’d walk with that invisible halo, that ever-present glow I couldn’t tear my eyes away from. Everything about her shimmered: her wheatfield hair and bronze skin, her eyes like amber with drowned insects flecked in them. When Carmen entered a room, I could swear I heard buzzing. As if she carried honeybees in her throat. I wanted that, too: wanted to shrink till I was the size of a nail clipping and sit near her uvula, press my tiny hands flatly against the back of her tongue. She’d feel my presence and choke around me, make a pitiful little gargling sound and cough me out with her spit, and I’d emerge drenched and changed somehow. I’d only grow back to my normal size once she’d left and she’d never know I’d been inside her, which is what I wanted most of all. Carmen talked like a boy but didn’t dress like one. She wore prairie dresses and red lipstick that turned her mouth into a bullseye or a warning sign. When I was little, I’d practised with my dad’s pistol out back until I had perfect aim. I wanted to force feed her flawless mouth bullets. She’d catch them with her teeth and swallow them with the bees and they wouldn’t hurt her, I knew this, she’d keep walking the way she always did, the way that always disoriented me, unharmed but maybe with a new bullet-shaped scar on her tongue. If she could survive lightning, what on earth could I do to her? I couldn’t even touch her. If I didn’t explode immediately, I’d get trapped in the spiderweb of her skin. One day, we were alone in the car park. She was smoking a thin cigarette and I was thinking about what else I wanted to put in her mouth: a dart, a fishhook, peach slices so ripe they’d slide right down her throat. Cranberry juice, as red as her lipstick, which had now left a faint ring on the cigarette. She smiled at me and, I swear, blew out a cloud of smoke shaped exactly like a handgun. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do then. Unlike her, I wasn’t handpicked by anyone so I could make my own choices. This often felt more like suffocation than freedom. I just looked at her a little longer as the smoke and her smile evaporated. She didn’t say anything either. She held out the end of her cigarette and I took it without touching her fingers, aligned my own lips with the pink mark her mouth had left behind. When I inhaled, I looked at the sky where the clouds were greying. The whirring started in my lungs and spread outwards in all directions. Carmen just stood there and smiled like she knew something I didn’t, but which I’d know soon enough.