Clean: A Novel

by Alia Trabucco Zerán

Mouths are always hiding something, even if most people don’t pay much attention to them. Words leave their mark, sketch deep lines that can’t be erased. Look at your own mouths if you don’t believe me. At the marks left by judgmental words, by the cruel and unnecessary things you’ve said.

I didn’t have a mother I could call, and that opened up a silence in me so profound that anything anyone said was mere noise.

You might never have given it any thought, but words have a specific order. Cause–outcome. Beginning–ending. You can’t just arrange them any old way. When we speak, each word has to stand apart from the one before, like children lined up at the classroom door. From small to big, short to tall—the words go in a particular order. With silence, on the other hand, all words exist at once: gentle and harsh, warm and cold.

I also learned that there aren’t words for everything in this world. And I’m not talking about matters of life and death. I’m not talking about lines like “there are no words for some pain.” My pain did have words, but as I scoured the bottom of the toilet bowl, as I scrubbed the mold from the bathtub, as I sliced an onion, I no longer thought with words. The thread connecting words to objects had snapped, and all that was left was the world itself. A world stripped of words.

Death, I thought, meant becoming pure past. It meant never again falling ill. It was simple, quick. Death wasn’t horrible, do you understand? It never had been. What was horrible, truly horrifying, was the act of dying.