【by Rajsi Rana】

If I’m quiet enough in my own kitchen, I get to hear a world where the creatures live behind the silence. Sometimes they like to sing, but only around me. Around me. They spin out, and if I look up from the soup I’m making I would see them—black! blue! pink! green! purple!—they are cooler than I will ever be. They skip and hop and dance around, skating on the countertops I spilled salt on, screeching to a stop when they come to the spilled chili flakes. If I look too long they disappear, and I don’t want them to, so I look down at my soup, stirring, listening. 

If I’m quiet for too long in a car ride with my mother, I will want to tell her all the chronicles in my life she doesn’t know. Two birds perch on my shoulders on these car rides. They weigh down, they hold on, they pester each other and me, they peck my neck. They’re ticklish. Tell her! Tell her everything! I pat the birds on the head one at a time. I pinch my lips hard so I remember my own rules. I leave it all in my head. The birds accept defeat and fly out the open car window at the next red light. 

If I’m quiet while I walk, I can hear my heartbeat. I can feel every single person I know living in me, in the space I carved out for them in my heart. I think I’m running out of room. Maybe it’s time to pull my heart out of my chest and place it on my sleeve. I’ll carve new homes in there, clean out the vacated valves. How many souls will find home in there?  

If I’m quiet in my head but not with my mouth, I can taste the seeds, the roots, the stems, the petals of a flower, maybe even a family of them. They multiply, grow deeper, pressing into my esophagus, my stomach, they grow upwards too. They threaten to choke me, or worse, to spill out each time I speak, to show themselves to the world, my version of Pinocchio’s ever-growing nose. If I talk enough, the bees will come, brush themselves past my lips, go where the flowers are—down my throat, up my nose. They will find new spaces in me I’ve never seen myself. They will stay.