FICTION | Gina Fallas-Rodriguez A Voice

FICTION

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

of anxiety.

She had to know more about these singers. Did they sound the same live? If they didn’t, she immediately crushed the slithering snake of auto-tuned voices beneath the heels of her calf-length-boots. Her heart cooled the lava of their notes, so they turned to stone and had no chance of warmly flowing through her veins. She would not deal with a lousy-voice-lover.

If they sounded the same live, their springtime love was just beginning. She listened to their studio voice, she yearned for their acoustic words, she basked in the exposed nakedness of their live songs. Song after song, she knew every inch of their words as her lovers’ breaths filled their. abdomens and pushed the tone through the chest, let the tones dance in their vocal box as it eventually left their curved lips. They released the song to her.

She would be content with those songs, their voices swirling around her, making her feel like someone else could see the pieces of her.

As she fell in love with their voices, she dreamed of them coming into her bed. Her lovers’ bodies would consume her passion, everything she had. They would sweat, breathing into each other, moving their limbs in unison, in a dance wherein they were built to please each other. They would smell of musk, and campfire, a little bit of Earth, and a touch of vanilla. As her heart raced and she was certain she could no longer take it, they orgasmed together. As she was in the midst of her intoxication, her lover would let their smoke-filled voice slip from their lips, and surround her senses, pressing in on her mind like a drug. Their breath would wind over her thighs, trace the length of her torso, and caress the curves of her breast. They would sing her a song that aroused her again, that made for hours of vocal-

filled-bliss.

She would wake up, a few beads of sweat starting to form by the hairline of her brown strands. Her mouth would be wide open, caught in a song, as if she was singing out to her imaginary lovers. Her voice was that of a siren, trying to bring them to the shores of her bed. Waiting for them to jump and rock the frame, the way the waves in the Strait of Messina threw themselves against Ulysses ship. She challenged these singers with voices of Earth to defy the call of her own. Her haze-filled cool tones that ebbed and flowed, traveled on the night breezes beyond her door, trying to find someone that could match her own harmonies and quell the restless nature of her love.

Then when the dusk was dispersed by the light of dawn, her own voice subsided. She felt a pain in her heart. Would her love ever be steady, solid? Would she ever find the voice that satisfied her beyond one night?

Once she dreamed of her imaginary lover, they rarely made it back into her bed. Instead, it was on to the next voice, that would turn frog to royalty. The next voice she might call to in the middle of night.