Earth-Shaker

It was dead inside me. Not quiet — dead. Like a house after everyone moved out and forgot to tell the ghosts to leave.

My mouth gagged with shame — thick, wet cloth, the kind they use to muffle truth so it doesn’t wake the neighbors.

My voice choked out of me in pieces. Syllables with broken legs, limping, begging not to be born.

Forced to be invisible. Fold yourself smaller, they said. Take up less air. Be the wallpaper. Be the shadow of the wallpaper.

And I did. God, I did. Until invisibility started to itch. Until silence grew teeth. Until the dead thing inside me kicked.

That made me scream. Not a polite scream. Not a sorry-if-this-bothers-you scream.

A rip-the-sky-open scream. A tectonic-plate, fault-line, continental-shift scream. The kind that makes the earth check its pulse.

I screamed until all corners of the earth could hear me — North, South, East, West, and the fifth corner, the one inside your chest you pretend isn’t there.

You hear me now? Good. Because dead things don’t stay dead when you set them on fire with your own breath.

I’m not invisible. I was incubating.