Slivers of a Voice
by Nik Korpon

…and everything comes into focus, the sunspot flare fading to fingers of yellow. I’m lying on a beach, warmth on all sides of me. I try to look around but can’t move. Water rushes towards me, the tiny hip of a wave crumbling and spreading like Madeline’s flaxen hair over the sun-bleached sheets we bought when we first married. Pausing, listening, her voice wavers in the breeze, the ghost of an echo more felt than heard. I try to cup my ear but my arms won’t move. They must be broken. But they’re not throbbing, not bleeding, not pulsing. They’re just, well, not. Madeline’s voice reverberates through. It’s a dolphin mapping my soul using echolocation and the timbre of her voice is angular and I believe I’m a grain of sand.

She laid a book by Kafka on my nightstand once, trying to get me to read it. I get the distinct feeling that I should have.

I try to respond to her call with my non-existent voice and flail my phantom limbs but I’m only greeted by rushing and tumbling, an expired wave enveloping me in a liquid embrace. Thousands of particles like me swirl in underwater wisps of fog and form the contour of our grandson. It could be Madeline, really. They were both etched from limestone, him perched in her hospital room for so long, sitting with me, that I was afraid they’d fade into the same photograph. The cheek begins to solidify, then a flick of tail and it’s all black…

...and everything comes into focus, the haze of water suddenly clear. Pieces of sand pass in granular blurs as I dodge through them and I think I’m a fish.

Bubbles carry her voice, tiny bits of Madeline I absorb through my gills and in a flash I see pockets of air in the insulin syringe as I sat wondering how much was too much, wondering if it was still a mortal sin if I didn’t wear my glasses while I drew up the dose, wondering if I really cared. A bubble bursts and I race forward to catch each fragment of her voice. It’s stronger, more pungent and I can only hope I’m getting closer.

I dart through evergreen blades, searching as strange muscles move in familiar ways. Currents rush over my scales and the far edge of the water looks close enough to reach with a few strokes but is equally infinite as a forbidden kiss in a darkened hallway. I swim until I am an ovular flame and I must be a large fish because the others scatter, the water dims ahead of me and everything goes dark…

…and everything comes into focus, the air pulling on a hundred thousand pieces of pinprick cotton embedded in my skin. Feathers. They are feathers. They are feathers and Holy God, I’m flying. I tilt back to stay on a straight path. My beak is deep, filled with water and fish. Madeline always liked pelicans. A tiny fist clenches inside my chest. Do I exist only in her dream? I flap my wings and soar over what looks to be an island, dive and swirl and shake the fear with aviary acrobatics. Our grandson told us once that pelicans were the most tragic animals of the kingdom. To feed, they dive into the water and grab fish. The pressure of impact eventually destroys their eyes until the shimmer of food is indistinguishable from a mundane wave, and most pelicans die of starvation. They are ruined by life. Madeline told him to stop being so morbid. If he was here, I would tell him that I sustained myself on her love for years after she passed, and I dare a pelican to challenge me.

No wind blows but I float along the hot currents of her voice, her scent. The island blurs to a hazy nothing, neither sapphire water nor palm forest, nothing but the wavy lines of rising heat even though it’s barely warm enough to sweat. The air is tactile with salt and I wonder if all birds feel like this. I angle my wings and skim along the water. Sweet gurgles from waves that curl like the tip of her eyelashes and her dislocated voice is the air, it’s everywhere and nowhere and I’ll sooner blind myself with water than stop looking for her. The edge of my wing slices through the face of a wave and sends me askew, tumbling through liquid air. As I right myself, I glimpse the dark mouth of a cave I hadn’t noticed. A quick slice of light glints in the blackness. I flap my wings, barreling towards the echo of her voice that sings louder and the fist inside my chest disintegrates, the lingering threat of mortal transgression evaporating because at the edge of the cave sit her two elfin feet, surrounded by cascades of flaxen hair…