She’s eating a cheese Danish at the bar top in a café and reading a book. Her hair is like a wire brush and her lips are a plum. She’s translucent: you can see the veins in her skin networking around her arms and shoulders, down her chest until they disappear beneath her shirt collar, to reemerge beyond her shorts and race to her feet, bluer as they descend. She’ s oblivious to the people around her, intent on the book.
Every so often, she furrows her brow. After a while she sets the book down and reaches her hands to her neck, massaging out the flecks of cramp and tension. She tugs and presses with languid, dancing fingers, but gives up with a sigh.
Someone comes through the door nearby; a blast of humidity assaults her; she recoils. She seems to welcome the disruption though, smiling at the door as its seal pinches closed. The book envelops her again, and while I watch, the words from its pages begin to leap up and crawl on her.
She becomes a page.
By finger’s breath she turns the pages as words continue to slither up her hands. The text is small, quick, undecipherable, black and ominous, contrasting her tissue paper skin. The words must be light on their feet because she doesn’ t slam the book shut or seem to notice the migration.
The first sentence arrives at her eyes and disappears beneath her lids. Consonant clusters and vowels creep below her surface headed to her brain. If anyone opens the door again the words may scatter and she’ll be stuck with half an idea embedded in her mind.
Now she’s covered in them. She has no white space left; her skin is black as oppression.
Letters have tangled in her hair so it’s kinked and woven at her skull. So many have flooded in through her eyes that they’ve turned tawny. All that’s pink is the rim of her lips, now swollen with grammar. Her once visible veins are covered beneath the flow of syntax and punctuation. Several jagged strips appear like scars over her back, entire paragraphs dammed in the flow.
She turns the final page, closes the book and leans against the chair’s back to stretch her tortured body. With no more words to transcend, her skin begins to lighten. The scars fade and her eyes pale back to blue. She slides off her chair like a plane crash. Fatigued, she wrestles the book into her backpack then heaves the bag over her shoulders with a great effort. The 'Souls of Black Folk' is heavy in tow, and the expression on her face suggests she’s accepted its weight.