Andromeda
by Alanah Tuohey

Runestone, volume 12

Sometimes being alive is sitting in the jaws of that great beast sublimity and screaming bite
down! bite down! Because the feeling of its tongue lashing past is so sweet. It’s electricity
doesn’t quite touch, but it ionizes, and it makes your blood hot, sweet ambrosia and it’s spit
soaks your clothes and it’s voice— dreadful and beautiful and more enormous than anything
you could ever touch in that dollhouse you knew wasn’t quite life— it’s voice becomes for a
moment all there is, judgment trumpets and celebration and rage and purring, purring pleasantly
beside your ear, though it is not for you— and that’s the beauty of it, of being so small that you
can fit yourself inside the mouth of oblivion and revel there— laughing, gasping in it’s breath, hot
petrichor and ozone, in your own echo of it’s speech that it will never hear. It’s why those
scholars touched the books, you know, to look the yawning old ones in the eye— but I like to sit
the throne of it’s unfeeling tongue instead, between the gnashing teeth of splintered wood, and
when it spits me out back to that pale, still place that calls itself life I come back changed,
painted in the vibrant shades that only show themselves beneath a black palate, and knowing
the meaning of certain words again.