She looked at me with a whisper, a whisper of impossible tonics kissed by error and wrapped in something her very own: a cobblestone alleyway with gas lamps.

She whispered through centuries and languages, from unintelligible crude rocks to dashes and swoops of a corset. Through blue eyes and clouds, through dizzy spells of humanity’s uproar and endorphins fueled by alcohol.

She whispered and yelled and then she screamed, with the power of an open heartbroken and men fallen, up through the air and down through roots long faltered.

She screamed and screamed and nothing came out like it did from her whisper. She fell quiet. For she was nothing without the lilt of a tongue when greeting the one vitality she couldn’t make tangible.