Death in the Mouth by Sloane Leong

Author:Sloane Leong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Diaspora Horror, Horror, anthology
Publisher: Sloane Leong
Published: 2022-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

She watches your face the whole trek back to the man’s grave.

Everything about you reaches out to be cataloged: your chin held high and wonderfully poised, the pearlescent pockmark in your thumb, that steady, confident rhythm to your speech.

The last of these is easily the most precious of your features, and you speak the whole way to show it off. Your low voice of burning coals and smoked firewood warms the ashes of all that dissipated when sleep gave way to waking.

“Tell me,” she whispers, at a break in the storytelling. She doesn’t have the words yet, but she needs to know. “Aida, Silvia, Lito, Light Bringer…”

“Essie.” You smile. “That’s my name.”

“Essie,” she repeats, savoring the revelation of it.

Once, it was your turn to live in amber divested of willpower. You’ve traded back and forth countless times, yet here you are to pull her back from the edge of loss, and to do the same for Aida and for Silvia.

“Lito,” she says, darting through the trees with your wrist in her hand. “Here!”

It isn’t like when she failed with the man she loved, and it isn’t like when she triumphed with you. He comes back slowly, and the only price paid for it is time wound back and back.

It’s the same slow unraveling from sleep that came for her when his blood and Silvia’s woke her.

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