Mouthgate
by Sarah Cavanaugh
Sara Cavanaugh, echo, digital photograph, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
MouthGate
Sarah Cavanaugh | Apr 2024 | Issue 32
I have 19 little blue people living in my throat.
I feel them grabbing fistfuls of flesh on their attempts to ascent through my throat up to my mouth.
They’re small enough and light enough, their hands and feet don’t hurt me much, but there are enough of them to make their presence, their power, their intentions known. They want out. They need out. They came here only to escape.
Like magic, they can protrude a head or a hand or a foot through the skin on my neck, wink or wave hi, without puncturing my skin or making me bleed. I can see them do so in the mirror. I can see them do so in pictures and videos.
No one else can see them. No one else looks hard enough. No one else wants to.
They’re wrapped tightly, like mummies, in layers upon layers of semi-transparent blue.
My therapist says it’s significant that they live inside my throat. She says some people — people who haven’t experienced a lifetime of being silenced and negated — might say they have 19 years’ worth of stories built up in them they need to get out.
People like me — our bodies find other ways. We birth 19 little people in our tracheas. They try to army crawl their way up our throats’ slimy walls. They fall back down, get caught up and choked in our collar bones over and over again. Recede and rest a while all nuzzled up and muzzled in the nooks of our scapulas.
When they feel brave, they braid themselves ropes with knotted nerves and cast them up to the jawbone.
A long line of little people gather ‘round, wrap their hands around the braided beige, press their feet against my neck’s interior wall. Little blue biceps pulling little blue bodies up against gravity.
Nine times out of ten, the rope breaks under their weight before they reach the peak. The ones who beat their odds — they spend a few days in my chin hugging their knees, exhausted.
My chin was loaded with little blue people during the days following my testimony. I swear my chin looked at least two and a half times bigger than usual, like a grotesquely swollen, impregnated knot tying my face together at the bottom, keeping its contents from pouring a puddle onto the floor. But outside people said my chin still looked like usual.
Sometimes in my chin they fall asleep, then awaken between my clavicles without memory of the descent. Start back over.
Sometimes they plead with me to carve them a door along the anterior sinister side of my neck. A rescue mission: Cut into the sternocleidomastoid muscle. Slice the jugular vein. Snap the vagus nerve. Free the little people.
When they manage to summit my slippery throat, they settle in my inner ears to await the parting of my mouthgate. Make me hear things others don’t.
Creaking doorways in my inner earways — opening, closing, one-way paths to our pasts.
The screaming. It never goes away. So badly do I long to be the one getting to do the screaming.
I think, maybe, the little people are my hope.
I imagine them emerging from my mouth as little screams. Peeking through squinted eyes adjusting to the light outside my flesh, each one growing taller, growing louder, traveling faster as they greet the air.
Maybe they are ready. Maybe I am ready.
Still, my mouth won’t let them out.
Sarah Cavanaugh has a BA in Psychology from Stonehill College, and minored in creative writing. She lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts and works at a therapeutic community on a working farm, where she sometimes co-facilitates a weekly creative writing group. Her writing seeks to make, unmake, and remake meaning of her experience and different states of being. Lately, she has enjoyed exploring the use of plant materials to create handmade paper and ink as a means of deepening the relationship between the content of her writing and its tactile aesthetics. She is currently working on a longer piece of narrative prose.