I'm blind and I breathe fire. My mouth is full of molten rock, sloshing like soup too hot to close your lips around. I cough out black smoke, splattering out searing liquid as I do. My mouth fills again with magma, bumped up like bile from my guts. I am buried in the sand, up almost to my lips, head tipped back, agape. I have no arms, no legs. My throat runs deeper than my bones, down to the churning guts I share with other mouths, other souls. Flakes of jagged metal, like bits of broken rust, scrape my throat on their way out. They scrape the sky and the smoke. They make sparks, and lightning arcs out of my mouth. I am sick, sweating inside, and desperate. This is when they come. I don't know how they look, but they feel light and tiny. They stand on my lips and sing songs. Then they leap into the soup and become bundles of twigs. They're cool to the touch, for a moment. Soothing. I swallow them like pills. Two and three at a time. They dissolve. Then the liquid cools into stone and I sleep. 2008-05-21T17:06:17Z http://ficlets.com/feed/story/30752 <p>You know, I&#8217;m going to Maui next month and I&#8217;m taping this Ficlet to the guide book. Brilliant!</p> http://ficlets.com/stories/30752?basename=63851 2008-05-21T17:06:17Z Seth Miller http://ficlets.com/authors/mostlymuppet <p>Quite brilliant. I particularly like the description, &#8220;My throat runs deeper than my bones &#8230;&#8221;</p> http://ficlets.com/stories/30752?basename=62972 2008-05-17T17:50:36Z ZorkFox http://ficlets.com/authors/zorkfox <p>Very bizarre, halfway between personification and mythos. A typo or two in the 3rd paragraph, maybe?</p> http://ficlets.com/stories/30752?basename=62872 2008-05-17T00:50:29Z THX 0477 http://ficlets.com/authors/thx_0477