Free Fen by Daisy Johnson

time away had lost them nothing, had given them only a perspective of loss. A knowledge of absence. Except, when he arched back his head, mouth open, and let out a one-syllabled word, there was a sharp pain in the roof of her mouth. She rolled out from under him. He lay back, one hand under his head, sweat on his forehead and neck.
    Are you all right?
    She put a hand over her lips, eyes watering, probed the roof of her mouth with her tongue, felt the pulse of ulcers gathering in rings.
    What is it?
    It was clear now: again the skid of hurt against her teeth at his words. She rocked back off the bed, one hand warding him away, though he followed, dog-like, reaching out. She caught the door in her fist, shut it between them. His voice, coming muffled through the wood, burnt her mouth and eyes.
    What is it? Sarah said, coming down the hallway.
    Nora watched, clenching her teeth, as the force of Harrow’s muffled words started to hit Sarah’s face.
    The impact of Harrow’s language on Sarah seemed much worse than it was on her – a single syllable eliciting vomiting, sentences starting nosebleeds – so Nora took Harrow to the garage and sat with the door pulled closed.
    He wrote: I don’t want to .
    She told him she didn’t care. Turned the light out so he couldn’t see what was happening to her. Gripped him by the wrist and told him what to do.
    They tried out all the letters one by one, cycling through the alphabet twice until she dug her nails hard into his palms and then he was quiet. They worked through nouns, verbs, adjectives. She made him try out adverbs, pronouns and prepositions. She tested herself by waiting for pain, noting down the area and velocity at which it came. When a word seemed to elicit less pain or appear in an area which seemed less extreme (for example her arms or legs as opposed to her face or torso) she squeezed his hand twice to make him repeat it. Mostlythe word repeated would bring on pain in a different area or of a different type and then they would carry on. If the word caused in any way a similar reaction she noted it down.
    At first the word ‘partial’ seemed to have a reaction less extreme than others. This was later proved to be otherwise. At first the phrase ‘wanted scrabble she’ appeared to elicit pain after a longer than normal waiting period. This too turned out to be incorrect.
    But if anyone could fix him it was her.
    She caught the neighbour’s rabbit on one of its escape trips and brought it down in her arms into the garage.
    He wrote: That’s enough. I don’t need to speak .
    She held the rabbit, not wriggling, only sniffing a little, in her arms. Come on, she said.
    He wrote: Fuck you backwards with a broomstick .
    She told him to go through his consonants the way they’d done before and she would tell him when to stop. She sat numbly as he did it, holding the rabbit. It fought her. She could feel his words on its body.
    Later she went round with the rabbit in a plastic bag, told them she’d found it in the garden.
    At the end of the week they caught him trying to jemmy the window with a slat broken off his bed. Sarah went down quickly under the onslaught he unleashed against them – unconnected words, curses, quotes Nora recognised from films, the names of people they’d gone toschool with. He only stopped when Nora caught, with her finger, the quick trickle of blood from her own nostril, raised her hand to show him.
    Most days, when she woke, she could feel it was too late anyway; his words were in her system like a sickness. She could feel the spiky pressure of letters against her gut, the sticks of Ks and Ts and Ls on her insides. She could hear Sarah coughing as if something, a spark plug or wire, had come loose in her. They were not sleeping in the same bed because – though he never had before – he’d started talking in his sleep.
    One morning she made a cup of tea, went and opened the door to the sitting room. He was asleep on the sofa. She tightened