She Eats Her Words

by Sarah McPherson

She starts with the corner of a newspaper, rolls it into a ball and swallows it down. She can taste the vowels, popping like grapes in her mouth.

The next day it’s a page from her notebook, scrawled with yesterday’s to-do list. The ink is wine-dark, luscious.

She can’t stop; haunts the stacks at the local library, stuffing her mouth with torn out extracts of the classics when the librarians aren’t watching. They all have their own flavours. Jane Austen is an apple tart. Lewis Carroll is sometimes cake, sometimes mushrooms. Edgar Allan Poe has the bitter sweetness of dark chocolate, and Charles Dickens is a smoky single malt. She consumes several volumes before she is thrown out.

Soon her bookshelves are empty. The former occupants’ jackets lie in discarded heaps, their insides—end papers and spines—exposed. Her Amazon order list is full; cardboard envelopes sliding through the letterbox at all hours of the day and night, consumed as quickly as she can tear them open.

Her belly is full of paper; it rustles when she moves like dry leaves. She can feel it scratching the back of her throat when she talks.

One morning she wakes up coughing and when she sits up all the words come spewing back out, a flood of them, pages and pages. The ink has blurred and run and the sentences have knotted themselves together in new orders; Poe’s Raven and Carroll’s Hare having tea at Pemberley.

But some of the words are her own, bleeding onto the back of crumpled newsprint, spelling her out; revealing her.

Sarah McPherson loves folk tales and myths and finding the weird in the everyday. Her flash fiction has been widely published, nominated for Best Small Fictions, longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50, and selected for Best Microfiction 2021. She lives in Sheffield, is a serial crafter, and spends her weekends doing live action roleplay in the woods.