Doxologized

She had many sad stories, they were filed away, labeled, color coded; tales presented as apocryphal bibles. He would listen as she pulled them out of her droning breast, intoned then as if reciting poetry to an acolyte sponge. Her stories festered the air with pitiful sorrows, scratched yet more stigmata upon hide-bound woes. White paper moths would fly up to his eyes as if to illustrate her narratives; tissue thin, he would see within them the many skeletons of her living ghosts, bones free now of all minerality, fish-wet and wriggling in the gel of a long preserved plasma. He often closed his ears to make his lips numb. The nasal gnarl of her broken voice coated his tongue with sticky commiserations, a jejune sympathy that had the texture of mildewed goatskin. Her words mechanically ticked off every injustice and persecution ever heaped upon a martyred mind. Eventually though, her deep well of mopes dried to a blubber of sighs. Then all those emaciated moths would flutter around her anointing her echoing skull with a seeping urine-like substance she called love.