Adnofagia

“Do you eat names?” she asked, because questions asked to things sometimes answered back by ways other people could not hear. The hollow sighed; the sound was like breath through wheat.

is defined as pain or severe discomfort experienced in the mouth, throat, or esophagus during the act of swallowing. While it is frequently confused with

In the final days, a nurse in a crumbling Cairo hospital held the hand of a dying man. His adrenals were gone, his thyroid a ghost. But his eyes were clear—clearer than they had ever been. He looked at her and smiled, and his smile had no warmth in it, but it had something else.