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F ICT ION
A Voice By Gina Fallas-Rodriguez
She wondered if she could ever love anybody. Her love was fickle. The only thing her lovers had in common was that she loved their voices. Their voices were the smoke and grit that flowed out of volcanoes with fiery, all-consuming lava. She didn’t want a smoothed-voice singer who sounded as if the doctor had just slapped their bare bottom on the way out of their mother’s uterus. She wanted voices that had felt pain, that sounded broken, that made her believe that so many pieces of a self could be put back together and made to sound beautiful. No matter how ugly she found them to be in appearance, the grit, the pebbles of her lovers’ voices pattered against her hard-hat-wearing-heart and eventually created a chip that allowed the husky smoke of their tones to twist their way around her desire. She would first hear their song on the radio or in the backdrop to a scene in a show. It bore its way into her mind, the ticking of her rapid thoughts finding a reason to slow down and pay attention to something other than the never-ending strings
