Warm Bodies Mtrjm Kaml -

“Trans… late… com… plete.”

I don’t know which is right. Language is a living thing, and I have been dead for so long. Dead things don’t speak. They only moan.

But now, inside this ribcage—this dusty apartment where my heart used to live—something is scratching at the floorboards. It wants out. It wants to spell. warm bodies mtrjm kaml

I don’t know what it means. Maybe it was a song once. Maybe it was a name. The syllables land in my chest like coins in a dry fountain. Mtrjm. A translator. Kaml. Whole. Complete.

“What did you say?” she whispers.

But moans are just words that forgot their shape.

I am the translator. She is the completeness. “Trans… late… com… plete

I see her sleeping on the floor of the 747. The broken windows frame a moon that looks almost fake, like a prop left over from the old world. Her hand is open. I touch her palm with one finger. Not to eat. To feel.

Before her, my vocabulary was small. Hungry. Cold. Grr. Argh. Lights out. They only moan

We are the same wrong thing, finally correct.

She stirs. Her eyes find mine. Most things look at me and see a corpse. She looks at me and sees a question mark with a pulse.