Logorrhea: Logorrhea

Michelle Richmond is one of the few contributors I've never met. I was extremely happy to see that someone chose the title word for the anthology. And I have to say, I'm extremely happy with the final results:

Logorrhea
by Michelle Richmond

He had not been born with the scales. Indeed, the origin of his condition was as enigmatic to the mother who bore him as it was to the scientists who studied him, for nowhere in his mother’s family album or in the scientists’ vast store of case histories was there another human being so gloriously esquamulose.

He was three years old when the scales began to appear—on his upper legs, at first. Tiny, half-moon shaped bits, hard and thin, the rounded edges paper-sharp. One pediatrician diagnosed it as an allergic rash, another as a severe case of keritosis peritonitis, another as an indeterminable childhood abnormality that would surely right itself with age. But when the scales began to thicken and to stretch up his body—to his groin, his stomach, his arms, shoulders, neck, and eventually, his face, the doctors stopped trying to make a diagnosis. It was like nothing they had seen, it was miraculous, it was horrific.

One thing you should understand: the scales did not cover his skin, they were his skin. Unlike hair or fingernails, there was nothing extraneous about them. To rid him of the scales would have been to rid him of his very surface.

The doctors took pictures, they referred him to specialists, they did all of the things one does when an exceptional case is dropped, like a gift of manna, into one’s hands. But they offered no answers, only a long series of lotions and pills and dermatological treatments of the abrasive and purative variety, all of which yielded nothing—nothing but a sobbing, put-upon boy.

“No one has ever loved me before,” he said, by which he meant no one had ever fucked him—and to him, the two were one and the same.

All of these things he told me on our first night together. Our first! How could he hold it back, this dark history, when my skin bore the savage marks of his scales, when his flesh literally dug into mine?

*****
As always, Jeff VanderMeer thinks of things in a way that's different from the rest of us:

LOGORRHEA

(Excerpted from “Yetis, Loch Ness, and Talking Fish?” in the English magazine Strange Phenomenon, April 1935)

“There is really no sight that stirs the blood more than witnessing a giant Logorrheic Coelacanth plowing its way across the floor of old-growth Siberian forest, bellowing for all it’s worth.” – Dr. G. Merrill Smith

The freshwater walking fish called by some the "Logorrheic Coelacanth" has again been sighted in and around Siberia's Lake Baikal, as it has at regular intervals for hundreds of years. Most sightings occur miles from any water source, the fish reported to crawl awkwardly on its thick pectoral fins. Speculation leads this reporter to the conclusion that the Logorrheic Coelacanth must have a remarkable capacity to store water in pouches concealed by its gills. Thirdhand accounts tell of hunters encountering the voice of this fish before ever sighting it. (This reporter believes that the force of cycling water through the gills creates the sibilant yet throaty noise.)

In August 1934, the Logorrheic Coelacanth’s gill mutterings came under rigorous observation by Dr. G. Merrill Smith’s zoological expedition to track and tag Lake Baikal’s freshwater seals. Dr. Smith told this reporter that he saw “what looked like a squadron of raucous walking fish ugly as bulldogs at the edge of a clearing. Imagine my surprise when I realized they were speaking in an ancient shamanistic language associated with a lost race once close kin to the Smaragdineans.” Independent analysis of the field recordings made by Dr. Smith confirms the resemblance to certain rare languages. Some scientists have postulated a kind of inadvertent mimicry to explain the phenomenon. (Dr. Smith has stated, “I think it might be as coincidental as a cat coughing up a hairball sounding like speech.”) Others have proposed more outré theories, such as symbiosis between Neanderthals and the fish. Although no serious scientist accepts this theory, no one can explain the fish’s wanderings, the long intervals between sightings, nor give any reason for the fish to have developed this “adaptation.