Glossolalia

GLOSSOLALIA / Paula Rankin Downstairs, women are speaking in tongues. I do not understand them, but as the warbled, garbled syllables rise, it's just as hard not to imagine each tongue's reaching new bars of music, each head's sputtering lick of clarifying flame, as to believe in the hopelessness of speech or in atmosphere that bears our words to blue heavens, where we'll spend eternity taking them back. It was just as difficult not to believe my father was a messenger from God as to swallow his messages. Aphasiac at the end, he stammered a language of letting go, a radical phonics of reconnections, his tongue breaking through thickets of loss to rename the world's parts with absolute imperfection. When I laid my head on his chest, I heard a wind rasping dry leaves, consonants swept like trash, tracks, trouble from a room I did not want to lie in, a room where, years later, my daughter and I would drop to our knees in an anguish of incoherencies, our single agreement on links between blood, betrayal, allegiance, judgment, mercy, children, mothers, screaming— an agreement she never speaks of, cleaning her house, tending her child. A covenant like a room swept, moved out of, words like nail holes new tenants plaster over 44 · The Missouri Review until even the absences inside them are lost. She could be a woman after my own dumb heart, now that, more than anything, I want to call her, tell her how, when I was eighteen, a boy I loved was killed; every night for a month two friends and I lit candles, balanced a Ouija board on our knees, asked it questions. Every night for a month something answered. I later thought, knees, fingers, oscillations of brain, heart's throb for connections. But if I was wrong, if they were souls, they believed in God but were not with him. It was dark there, unimaginably crowded, and lonely. Call it Robert, John, Martha, father, sister, lover it would come spelling Yes. Anything to hold attention, anything not to be air or countlessness of stars, angels. Hours later I could still feel the graze of fingertips against the plastic triangle pulling me down the alphabet, my true love's leaning like curvature of time, space, breathing. Now I think we were calling ahead to ourselves, Whither? and calling back, Choose me. But if I am wrong lost souls are more in love with our voices and hands than we imagine, and Paula Rankin THE Missouri Review · 45 so lonely that when bored, exhausted with their world, we'd spell Goodbye, they'd blow the candles out; the triangle would slide out from under our fingers to No. 46 · The Missouri Review Paula Rankin ...