I am the translator. She is the completeness.

I whisper it against her skin. My lips are cracked. My voice is a rusty hinge. But the sound… it doesn't die. It hangs in the cold air like breath. Like proof.

But moans are just words that forgot their shape.

(R places his forehead against hers. No biting. Just pressure. Just a question waiting for an answer. Outside, the Bonies grind their teeth in the dark. But inside the plane, time stutters. A piano chord that was silent for years suddenly plays itself once, then stops.)

“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.

I don’t have the muscles for a full sentence. I have rocks in my throat. But I push one out.

“What did you say?” she whispers.

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.

She blinks. Then, impossibly, she smiles. “You’re trying to say I translate the whole. Or maybe… you make me whole. ”

End.

We are the same wrong thing, finally correct.

I point at my chest. Then at hers. Then I make a fist and open it slowly—a flower, a bomb, a heart.

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