The Second Voice
The name is spoken twice. Once by the living mouth that bleeds for it, once by the breath that will not leave. The room listens, a lamp goes dark, and smoke learns the shape of speech.
By the seventh week, I’d stopped trying to explain why I kept coming back.
There were practical answers I could give to people who didn’t know him. Grief, ritual, closure, art. None of them were true enough. The truth lived in the way the air changed when I crossed the threshold, in the way the light grew patient, in the way my skin seemed to recognise the chair.
He no longer asked for reasons. He simply prepared the station, the candles already burning, the gloves laid out like vestments on a small altar. He moved more slowly now, as if the room had taught him its own tempo. The bottle of ink made a soft click as he opened it. The machine lay curled beside the silver lamp, waiting for its turn to hum.
“Here,” he said, touching the upper part of my throat, just beneath last week’s mark. “Close, but not over.”
I nodded. The skin there still felt new, the letters tender under the surface. He cleaned the spot, tilting my chin with a fingertip. The cloth was cool. The smell of antiseptic rose and settled, threaded through with candle wax and a thin strand of salt.
When the machine started, the sound arrived like something remembered rather than made. Low, steady, not quite a note and not quite noise. He set the needle to my throat, and pain brightened the edges of the world. I breathed with it, small sips at first, then deeper draws, matching my chest to the pulse of the coil.
Without meaning to, I whispered the name.
It came out in time with the needle. Each syllable arrived with a small lift of sound, soft and obedient, like a listener repeating a prayer to make sure it’s correct. Saying it made the pain easier to contain, as if the voice could carry a portion the body didn’t want to hold alone.
The room altered. At first I thought the echo I heard was my own voice thrown back at me by brick and glass. Then the sound changed. It softened, slowed, took on a patience that wasn’t mine. The second time the name reached the air, it felt warmed from the inside, as if spoken by a mouth that understood more than breath.
He paused, the needle lifted. “Did you say something?”
I shook my head, though the word still moved around us. A voice not his, not mine. The air trembled with it, thin as smoke, certain as a heartbeat.
He studied my face. His eyes had that far look again, like a man listening for a train that’s due but not yet visible. “I thought I heard it,” he said.
“You did.”
He did not ask who had spoken. Perhaps he’d run out of questions that would make sense. He lowered the needle to my skin again. The hum came back louder, as if the machine wanted to drown whatever else had decided to talk.
I tried to focus on the work, on the precise way his wrist turned to form each curve. Every time he wiped the ink away with the folded cloth, the silver cap of the lamp caught my eye. The polished metal threw back a small, warped reflection of the two of us. In that rounded world I saw my jaw, his cheek, the dark halo of the lamp itself. And there, just behind his shoulder, I saw a pair of lips trying to remember themselves.
The first time it happened, I thought I’d imagined it. A trick of light, a fault in the metal. The second time, the shape returned, more certain, as if a face were assembling itself in the bend of silver. The lips moved slowly, forming the first letter of the name. The lamp’s surface fogged faintly, as though someone were leaning close to breathe on it.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The needle touched down again. The pulse in my throat answered. The second voice spoke just under the hum, low and near. Not a whisper you strain to hear, but a murmur at the edge of thought, the exact sound he’d make when he woke and said my name without opening his eyes.
“Still with me?” the artist asked.
“Yes.”
“Nearly done.”
He didn’t look up. He didn’t see the lips. I did, and I watched them shape the last syllable in time with the last pass of the needle. The hair along my arms lifted. The candle flames leaned inward.
He wiped the ink one final time. The skin stung, then cooled. He leaned back a little, assessing his line, that small ritual of approval he’d never let himself turn into pride. I swallowed, feeling the new weight of the letters beneath the surface.
I whispered the name once more.
The lamp blew out.
There was no breath I could claim, no wind from the window, no clumsy elbow against the shade. One moment the small halo of light rested on the steel tray, the next there was a soft sound like a sigh and it was gone. Darkness pooled where it had been. The silver cap held a circle of liquid night.
Neither of us moved. The machine had already fallen silent. The only sounds were the soft tick of cooling metal and the small unrest of the candles.
Smoke curled between us, rising from the lamp’s mouth. It didn’t go straight up. It drifted, turned, gathered, as if learning how to carry a shape. For a breath, it looked like the outline of a mouth, open and exhaling. The smell was sweet at the edges, not only wick and wire, but the faintest trace of a shore after rain.
He looked at me then the way people look at something that’s just crossed a border they didn’t believe existed. Cautious. Moved. A little afraid. He held my gaze for a long moment, the distance between us thinner than before.
“I heard it,” he said quietly.
“So did I.”
He set the cloth down. His hands had started to shake. Not much, just enough to make the light catch on his knuckles. He closed his eyes and breathed once, the deliberate breath of a man trying to match himself to a rhythm that isn’t his. When he opened them again, the room seemed calmer, although nothing had changed except that we’d both decided to let it.
He taped a small square of gauze to my throat. His fingers were gentle. “Keep it dry tonight,” he said, the old practicalities returning like a rope thrown back across water.
“I’ll try.”
He reached for the lamp, thought better of it, and left it dark. We stood a while in the soft, moving light, listening without speaking. In the reflection on the silver cap, the lips had gone. Only a smudge remained, a memory of warmth.
On the way home, I found myself rehearsing the sound, the way the second voice had carried the name back to me. Not repeating. Returning. A call and answer for a congregation of two, and whatever else had chosen to listen.
