Listen to this

No one was listening, so the boy closed his eyes and said what he’d always needed to say. What he had to say splayed out before him like a meal he couldn’t keep down. It accompanied him wherever he had to go in the world, day and night, whether the boy was asleep or awake. It rode closest to the backs of his teeth at night when he slept, so that his teeth flapped out like swinging doors in a western saloon, his thoughts swimming forth like a pack of sad cowboys migrating into the street, fixing to initiate a gunfight.