I hear them everywhere. Sounds. 

Just sounds. 

Everything contains them, and typically, when I arrive to scrape the words, I hear the sounds first. Sounds, then people, then words, then hearts, is typically the order of things. Sometimes, they give me a headache, other times...they bring sweetness to my mind that chills like a cold rain. 

Sounds are what keep me working. 

They keep the scrapings contained.

I urge you to look closer.

It’s okay...I don’t bite. 

Stare into the flame which dances across my palms. If you look as close as I’ve encouraged, you’ll see the words. Billions of them.

Written on the walls, jumping through the smoky haze, bleeding out into the pure air of the world. 

Tough to control, I’d say, though I’m the only one who would know. I’m the only one after all, with the job of the Word-Scraper. To take out a little toothpick or a spork or some similar poking device and address the edges of the flame. 

To scrape the words into a neat little pile and put them together, even if they don’t fit nicely. Oftentimes, it takes some rearrangement. 

If you keep watching, you’ll notice that some words will escape. They’ll spark with life and leap faithfully to the floor, and one of my many jobs is to catch them before they hit solid rock and shatter into a million pieces. 

That, friend, is way harder than it sounds. 

Most, in their right mind, would pass on the opportunity to do such tedious, sweat-inducing work. But I don’t really have a chance to do that. You see, I’m stuck here, scraping words, building stories, catching the desperate embers. Like any job, it feels a drag most of the time, but sometimes, it’s brilliantly rewarding. 

When you catch a word, or build the perfect little story out of the scraps from the flame. 

There are many stories, and with them, many Loves. 

The Splitter

You would expect that one with many pieces would go by many names. 

One with many jobs, God...too many jobs.

I do, in fact, have many jobs, and with that many names, and with that many pieces. It’s only appropriate that the one in charge of creating puzzles out of jagged words would also be a puzzle themselves.

And I suppose the punishment for fitting so many unmatchable words together would be that my pieces wouldn’t exactly mingle either. 

With the job of the Splitter, there are countless mes. 

Located everywhere throughout the jumbled mess of the flaming words....there are trillions upon trillions of Loves. Nestled in the hearts of countless humans, doing the job of scraping words from smaller flames, their hands singed and blackened by burns and soot. 

Each one is different. 

We start off the same: young women with our palms open to the fire, as we disperse throughout the desert of hearts where words fly like crows. 

And once each Love has created their human’s final, messy pile of words, they have changed greatly from each other. Some are big, some are skinny, some are starving, some are fat and jolly. Some are skipping and some are walking. Some hands are more burnt than others. 

And some, usually not many, are beaten, ragged, bleeding from their eyes, a figure of desperate sorrow. What follows them is woeful air, where the condensation is not water but sweat and tears. The metallic, salty smell is palpable when they come near. 

These are the Loves that have worked harder than the rest. They’ve had words that were particularly jumpy, puzzles that were particularly jagged, fire that was particularly hot. 

These are the Loves that have unwillingly become human. 

I can show you the room full of these copies. It’s a place much like a human Senior Center, the place where they put Grandma when she starts eating soap and lighting fire to the local alleycats. A place where the tired, lost, dying ones go. 

It’s full of the human Loves. 

Broken from their maiden journey. 

While the others continue to go back and forth, searching for the pedigrees and the proper hearts to rest in, these scarred copies come here to sit and stare at the wall and bleed. 

And die. 

If you look at every pair of hands in this heavy place, you will see the same matching burns: billions of words imprinted on their shallow skin. They’re the marks of words that could not be arranged together, no matter how hard those hands struggled. They are mismatched, disarranged; the wild animals of the word scrapings. 

But when I wander through this room of burnt hands and empty faces and I feel brave enough to take the hands of a dying Love, I can read the words just right...and make them form a story that was never possible before. 

These stories are cursed, I’ll be the first to tell you that. 

But sometimes, I can’t help myself. 

I have to know what shattered the Love so badly that they had to come to the place of empty skin and drippy eyes. 

I look.

I read the dangerous words. 

And although I continue to return, I almost always see something I can barely comprehend. Something which is so powerful that it burns my eyes and yanks a shriek from me that frightens the crows. 

Something so beautiful yet so raw. So weak, yet so terrifying. 

The cursed stories. 

I can barely hold them in the back of my mind. 

And one who can barely contain a story that is ready to burst surely must share them with anyone that will listen. Because otherwise, they sit, and burn through the depths of everyone’s mind. 

The broken Loves.

The stories that frighten the crows. 

The fire that is too hot for me to bear. 

Please stay with me. 

I have something to show you.