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By Root 439 0

mouth so that I cannot eat, my mouth so that I cannot kiss, my mouth so that I cannot smile. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Or at least make me better tomorrow than I am today, make me better next week than I’ve been this one. This was the voice in her head, a veritable Niagara of words, pouring over one another in their own immense cloud of turbulence and spindrift, but trailing alongside it was her other voice, her speaking voice, the one her ulcers had forced her to adopt, which employed as little motion as possible, so that she wound up rejecting even the shortest words in favor of easier ones, saying mm-hmm for yes and mm-mmm for no, and obliged her to take great care with every sentence she uttered so that avoiding her lesions would not distort her pronunciation. She was afraid that the voice she used in public would change the voice she used in the privacy of her thoughts, that fluid, unfearing voice with which she had once written her books. Presuming, of course, that it had not already. Your mind was not free of your body. That was the lesson.

“Well, this is it, Ms. Poggione,” the boy said, and she realized they had reached the hotel.

“Thanks. What’s your name now?”

“John Catau.”

“I thought that was your father’s name.”

“It is. I’m a junior, or unofficially I am. My dad is Jon Catau: J-o-no h-n. I’m John Catau: J-o-with an h-n.”

“Well, John-with-an-h, you can call me Nina.”

“Nina.” He took her wrist, rubbing his thumb along the pulse point as if he were calming an injured animal, and she understood what she should have all along: that he was hitting on her. His touch was warmer and more muscular than she had supposed it would be. “Are you sure I can’t buy you a drink?” he said.

She risked stretching her mouth to smile at him. “Some other time.” And she opened the door and went into the hotel.

Upstairs, standing at her bathroom mirror, she drew her lower lip cautiously away from her teeth. The flesh sent out a spike of pain, shimmering as she exposed it to the open air. She had ruptured some fragile seal over the sore, and blood came brimming from the threadlike crack, spilling into the pocket of her gums. Though the edges of the canker had softened, she knew from experience that it would get worse before it got better.

She sat on the ledge of the tub and made her ritual evening phone call. Wallace didn’t answer, so she left him a message. Each time her lips came together or her teeth bit into a letter, she had that terrible sewing-needle sensation. She tried to conceal her discomfort, but the effort gave her voice an oddly convulsive sedative quality, as if her limbs were twitching while she slept: “Hey, honey. I know you have play rehearsal tonight, but I’m wiped out, and I’m going to sleep, so I’m calling early. Your momma loves you. I hope you had a perfect day. Don’t burn the house down. Remember, the Stegalls are right next door if you can’t reach me and there’s an emergency.”

She hung up. For the thousandth time, she reflected that she should write a story that used no b’s, f’s, m’s, p’s, or v’s, one she could deliver without aggravating her mouth. “A Story to Combat the Pain,” she would call it.

But what if it wasn’t her lips that were ulcerated?

She would have to write a second story to avoid her hard palate, one without any c’s, d’s, g’s, h’s—oh so many letters.

And a third that would let the tip of her tongue lie still, a story that was all vowels and labials, unspooling with a long underwater sound.

So then: “Three Stories to Combat the Pain.”

She washed her face and brushed her teeth, all but the bottom incisors, then changed into her pajamas and slipped into bed. Four more days of readings, she thought. Four more airplanes to four more cities. She wondered how Wallace was doing without her. Had he remembered to lock the door? Was he eating the food she had Tupperwared? He was the kind of boy who would nibble at a hot dog, offering half of it to a stray animal, and consider himself fed for the day—but he was fourteen, and old enough now, they had decided,