skin in the thick copse within which floats a stream. One million effervescent frogs swim through the ventricles of a beating heart floating disembodied, below the clear water.
I begin assigning names: You are a pumasticate, I call the feline mouth roar jungles into savannas during dream hours while searching bloody bite, the mouth known to devour children in their sleep, the pumasticate who travels with his friend behemadillo, a giant armoured reptile that shakes mountains with steps, who ferries the pumasticate on his hard outer shell as he sucks the air for insects like the murmuring elephantickles my right ear at night hot words Iagian whisper. Irrelephants, you shoo, I usually slap my ear and say: onward ho, go now, I tell them, toward life or some measure of it. Animalia, mammalia, chordata, dividing and subdividing hallucination until oneday, the kingdom turns unexpectedly into tsetse fly nightmare, into a vast antiseptic room where employees peer shortwave radios through headphones. I tiptoe through that strange scene of cubicles wide-eyes soft decibels, learning the crafts of assembly and collection, muttering excitedly when I realize, horrified, how first the thoughts are heard on wireless radio before theyâre stored on magnetic tape. I pace jittery across the linoleum floor, talking louder, explaining to myself how then the tapes are cut and assembled according to the specifications of the Department 6119 inspector handling the terror case until the scene disintegrates and I discover my father, astounded by my words, raising me horrified up into the air, dangling legs oaken arms holding me up. I see him through stillglued eyes, babbling sleep. See him lifting me into mid-air: child of clay and of clotted blood, he names me, born of woman, he indicts me of childhood silliness excess, faults the strength and burst of my language my play. He roars and thunders against my dangerous words. When he sets me down on the floor he hugs me so deep all the air leaves my lungs. Enough, he says, but the tsetse fly illness does something to me: from then on, I begin muttering goongooning nasal mmm and llliquids, my blood leaping mouth onto floor. I would froth from the mouth, I shit you not; these early glossolalia scenarios were truly frightening to me and for others around me. Desperate for a cure, my mother dragged me doctor to doctor, convinced the cause was microbial and could be quelled with the right antibiotic, but they disagreed with her after a handful of failed medicinal attempts, arguing they had difficulty diagnosing the illness, they had decided glossolalia couldnât exactly be termed an infection and therefore couldnât stop it so simply.
Glossolalia. What is glossolalia and what do they say of glossolalia. You may know it as panting keening raise-the-roof kind of God talk, but my automatic tongue was different. I didnât pray for glossolalia and I fasted because I was hungry, as disobedient children do when they canâtfind what they want to eat. And though Iâd like to eschew all presence of the characteristic diagnostic signals church fever flushed face and tears observable in the few Pentecostal establishments in our unnameable country, I must recall that my father found me one day flapping arms in T-shirt, arms with budding vanes barbs barbules, stirring the fetid air in my room with hairy forearms that looked like feathered wings, muttering the story of once upon a time a father imprisoned his son in a wardrobe.
Who are you talking to, I heard a voice behind me and turned my neck one hundred eighty degrees wide-eyed right around like an owl to find Mamun Ben Jalounâs astonished face staring at me. From then on, I tried to be quieter about my heedless iterations, but they emerged without warning like Niramishâs narcoleptic sleep sessions. I would fly fantastical lines without consideration or worry for my surrounding listeners. I had become a glossolalist, an inexplicable