The phone rings but no one remembers how to answer. The sound threads through her jaw like a nerve rekindling. Each ring is a pulse, each pause is a breath her body forgot to take, another heartbeat her mouth cannot claim. She opens her mouth, but words burn and crumble on her tongue like burnt paper, ashes caught between teeth. Once, she carried every voice inside her, a river of syllables rushing behind her teeth. Now the current has turned to smoke. Only static builds between syllables, a low hum of unspoken names. Someone keeps whispering from the dial tone, a child, a lover, a god. She cannot tell which. Their voices melt together, salt and blood and static in her throat. She touches her lips and finds dust. Her tongue splits where vowels used to bloom. Memory is not gentle. It claws upward through bones and muscle, seeking light. When it reaches her mouth, it trembles, half song, half wound. She learns to speak again, but the words come out wrong: wet and red, trembling like new flesh. She presses her hand to her throat and feels them move, these small, broken resurrections of sound. Every silence remembers her. 

Betty Stanton