4.16b

So on and so forth.
I can't choke out my words; she's staring at me like something's wrong. Gross. Like the words are powder and my throat can't churn them out. Powder.
The pumice and silt settles again in my lungs and I give up on shoveling it out.
"Floyd?"
I just shake my head, and the thin dust wafts off and settles on my folded arms.
"Floyd, I'm still here. Please speak to me."
Alright, I'll shovel again, but just for you. Here we go--and yet, the true problem appears. All I can do is cough the dirt into my mouth. My teeth are grit-laden and they scream when I grind them. Again. Cough, and nothing. The dirt settles back down, and I stare at her with horror in my eyes. My mouth twists, unscrewing off my face.
"Ok," she says. "---- you, Floyd. ---- you. I'm going home, and you can find me there if you're willing to actually be my husband again."

Why did she find me right then? Why couldn't she have found me two minutes before, when the words were liquid and they poured out, overflowing and limp and thin, like watered-down soup? Like lemon water? Like gasoline spreading out across the top of a pond in a light sprinkling rain, reverberating and refracting the light like a million rainbows? And yet she didn't. I said all my words to the priest I don't believe in in a booth I don't appreciate in a church I've only seen and never appreciated.
No, I'm not that lucky, to have my slick, easy words drench her in truth. I have to shovel sand just to tell her what's happening in my life.

I guess it would be simpler if she wasn't so close with her own words. Talking with her is like dancing with razor blades. Not everything she says will cut. The backsides of the blades only press into your skin and remind you you're alive, oh no. The backsides are tame. But the blade--the edge. It's so sharp and thin that you think you've not been cut at all, until you see the blood seeping out and you say to yourself "that can't be my blood, where did that come from?" and you just go on with your day until the blood fills your shoes and slops out on the carpet she bought with her dowry and she yells at you again. Of course now she's shaving off huge hunks of flesh and you can see yourself ribboning in your mind's eye. It's a terrible feeling, dancing words with her.

So I walk home, trying to decide whether I rust her blades in water or I dull her blades in sand.