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.