Supper is pencils. 

As a child, I was taught the taste of lead, from its metallic aftertaste to the imprints it engraved along the flesh of my tongue. 

The architecture of my jaw has now become outlined with nooks, designed to allow each end of the #2 pencil’s crooked skeleton to squeeze into the cracks of my jaw. Peering into the mirror, I’ve at times mistaken these nooks for dimples, admiring the scratches that have evolved my smile from a child to that of a woman’s. But as I attempt to smile these days, the corners of my mouth, bearing the weight of the pencil for far too long, cry in pain. I’ve begun to practice smiling more and more, needing to learn not solely how to speak but how to be. 

“I m a vomen. I m maid for u,” I practiced, attempting to enunciate each vowel as my teacher had honed into me. 

It’s funny because the more you say something, the more foreign it becomes. 

“Wo-men. Vo-men. We-man. Ve-men.”

The words which took a few missteps in the alphabet, now compose their own music, riding to a rhythm of their own doing. 

Last August, the market began manufacturing metal barrels to better hold the lead. They called  them mechanical pencils. The producers marveled at their capacity to rotate and extend the lead to the customer’s own liking. They came in blues and pinks, and some even in purples. But no one in town was fond of them for they didn’t fit within the nooks of the oral cavity. Their flappy and vulnerable exteriors resisted the tender grip of my tongue, making them solely befitting for the paper but never the bare mouth. 

The people in town, unlike myself, disregarded its mechanics and blamed its price for their mere disliking. Its precision and swiftness were sadly obscured in the haze of these neoterics.  

“Iht iz 7:20 in de mourning.”

 When no one is looking, I abandon the wood for the plastic. I watch in awe as it devours the paper, gliding frictionlessly across it. 

But the elders quite often catch me red-handed in these little games of mine, repositioning the spine of the #2 graphite within the folds of my cheeks. 

“I m hungre.”

When I was young, the flaws did not matter so much. But as I grow older, the mounds of my palm have become engulfed in a mosaic of my own mistakes. Every mispronunciation, misinterpretation, becomes yet another stinging slap against the forks of my hand.   

But today was different. 

“Womb-en. Wom-an. Wo-man. Wim-en.”

Upon the exhale of each word, I whimpered as the mosaic had now reached the divide between my palm and arm. As the blood began seeping through the fabric of my skirt, I felt my eyes wander off to a different place. a different time. 

As the image eclipsed, I unknowingly bit into the pencil. Its former rigid structure collapsed into a barely-held-together, yellow stick-like amorphous structure. 

My teacher’s screams soon became muffled underneath the thunder of my laughter.