Burnt Tongues Read online

  Our teenage Marx with emo hair, our suburban Gandhi with black lipstick, Morris, she died a lifetime ago, but I’ll carry her scars forever. Studying at university, working at Oxfam, marrying the man I love, Morris was left behind but not her body.

  Going to the hospital, pretending to seek fertility advice. Then blurting it out while the doctor dissected the ovulation cycle—this is pointless. There won’t be any children coming from this body—the worst-case scenario stated as fact. An

  accident a long, long time ago is all I can say.

  Now, from the cold plastic bench, the confused and heartbroken man, my husband, he asks again, “Carolyn, are you okay?”

  He’s still holding the left hand, and I’m still picturing it covered in raspberry juice. Remembering three-for-two offers. Minimum wage migrant workers. Our bloody idiot. The story, still running over and over, watching my younger self. Me and not me. Scared the truth will put me back on the shelf, back on the market of loneliness.

  He stands up, hugs me, kisses me on the lips. He holds me.

  Maybe my sister can be a surrogate mother. Maybe, I think, we can see where adoption takes us. What’s worse than not knowing how a story starts or who the storyteller is? It’s not knowing what happens in the final chapter or who the storyteller will become by the end.

  “I love you,” I say.

  “I love you, too,” he says.

  Blues for girls or pinks for boys, either way, Morris is never going on the list of baby names.

  The Line Forms On The Right

  Amanda Gowin

  Where he was coming from didn’t matter, and where he was going was only home, so it was the in between that ended up important—in between two buildings. He shuffled, hands willfully deep in pockets, looking for nothing when he saw it. A glance to his right and there it was. A pink pump, a Pepto-Bismol slipper floating in the air beyond all context. He stopped short, rocking back on one heel in a pause that hadn’t quite made up its mind to be a pause.

  But there was more to the shoe than that. There was another shoe. His eyes adjusted, and instead of hanging in midair the shoes seemed to grow a girl, much the same way the grin grew a Cheshire cat. She was on one foot like a stork, all in black, a shock of bleachy tangly hair flipping back as she slid her foot into the shoe and plunked it to the alley stones with satisfaction next to the other. She examined her feet, then clicked purposefully away, with the authoritative step of all high heels.

  That sound echoed back. Think quick—yes, no—the wet stones stretched between them, drawing out her broken reflection almost to his own feet even as she retreated, and he thought, Yes. Scanning the street, finding it dead, he ducked into the alley like a novice predator to follow her round ass wherever it may lead.

  A disappointing door just a few feet farther, it turned out—one of those side entrances to a dive with the standard glaring bulb that rendered the sign unreadable.

  The door fell shut behind her with an obligatory echo off the buildings as it struck home. A few quick steps and he held the handle she had. Taking a deep breath to block out any logic, he yanked and entered.

  Standard dive, standard everything—except the girl. A cursory search found her on a red swiveling stool at the bar. She was tiny and pale and pushing back that mass of hideously wonderful hair, an unlit cigarette between her lips. He saw her in alternating profiles as she looked around.

  He removed his jacket slowly to buy a little time, making sure she wasn’t looking for anyone, wasn’t meeting anyone, then he slid onto the stool next to her. “Nice shoes.”

  Turning, eyebrows raised, she plucked the cigarette from her mouth. “Thanks. I stole them off a corpse in the alley.” No grin followed but he laughed anyway, and she shook her head. “I blame my voice. I was cursed with a high register, so I can say anything I want with no more malice than Minnie Mouse or Mia Farrow. That was a lot of m’s, wasn’t it?” Her hands followed a quick and thorough path from her neck on down. Some time before reaching her thighs she produced a book of matches. The cigarette caught, and she tossed away the burnt match with no interest in where it landed.

  Oh, she was entrancing. Too much eyeliner on almond eyes. Hazel? Was that hazel? And besides the hair and bright shoes, she wore gloves. Like the pale leather kind ladies wore to drive during the 1930s. What was a hand job like with a leather glove? “But think of all the horrible things you get to say. You have a built-in disclaimer.”

  Listening, but she wasn’t still, not for a second. Her eyes roved—over him, past him; she took in every corner without missing a beat in the patter. “What if I don’t want it? What if I just once want to tell someone I’m going to kill them and have them believe me?”

  Their eyes locked, as he didn’t know how to patter back to this, and her grin broke loose.

  He matched it. “Actions speak louder than words.”

  She laughed. “What is this place, anyway? Some kind of Elk or Moose or other antlered establishment? It’s like we wandered onto a movie set or something,” she whispered conspiratorially. “It’s all a bit too exact. The bartender is the standard Bartender Washing Glasses. Back in the corner are Billiard Players 1 and 2. In the second booth are—who? Alcoholic and Outspoken Barfly?”

  “I think they would be listed in the credits as Male Patron and Female Patron.”

  “Aren’t you kind?” She spun back to him. “But really. Fill me in. Is that Uncle Larry and Aunt Sheila? You got quarters on the table for the next game?”

  He shrugged. “No idea. I followed you in here.”

  Finally she was still. Her pupils seemed to narrow to points for a split second, then relaxed again, and she put her pointy little chin on her palm. “Isn’t that interesting.” It was almost a purr, not much like her voice before. “And I was just ducking out of the dark.”

  Her searching gaze fell on him now—his grey T-shirt, jeans, black work boots like all skinheads and serial killers wear, mussed brownish hair, and nowhere to hide anything. She seemed to slide him finally into a nonthreatening or at least manageably threatening category and ran a gloved finger across her lower lip before turning to yell, “Bartender Washing Glasses! Two Jack and Cokes!”

  They were collectively five drinks in before she stopped looking around every seventh second and he stopped calculating her inebriation level and the distance down the hall to the secluded bathroom—and that was the moment of realization. There was Something Else happening, and ulterior motives slid audibly onto back burners as a look passed between them. He ordered tequila shots, and they held them up in a toast.

  “To stolen time,” he said.

  Throwing hers back, she mumbled, “And that’s exactly what it is. What time is it, anyway? And are there any limes?” She spun her stool. “Dave, got any limes?”

  Of course there was an old cloudy clock with bent hands. It read just before midnight.

  Theon-a-first-name-basis-since-she’d-shown-him-how-to-make-an-origami-baby-Jesus-from-a-bar-napkin-and-he’d-laughed-hard-and-comped-them-a-round bartender smacked two limes and a medium-sized dull knife down in front of her and retreated demurely.

  Smile returning, she spun back around, knife in hand. “Do you see that? I’m the kind of person strangers feel comfortable giving a knife—without a second thought.” She split a lime with gusto, and one half rolled off the bar.

  “You got somewhere to be?”

  “Don’t you? Of course you do. That’s what I thought. So let’s have another shot and forget it again for now.”

  They did, or tried, and sucked limes, and howled with puckered cheeks.

  “Is there music here? Player piano, organ grinder, anything?” he asked.

  Cocking her head to the left, she answered, “Behind you.”

  A recon glance—so much became reconnaissance when two people got drunk together, he thought; the accelerated level of intimacy made everything else feel outside of them—revealed a jukebox. “I believe that may be constructed entirely of dust. Should
Dave be consulted? We wouldn’t want to disturb the natives, and they’ve been comfortably in silence the past hour.”

  Dave was consulted—then she clicked over to the jukebox in her pink heels. Wiping the dirty glass with the side of one glove, she pressed two numbers with little hesitation and was back on her stool by the time refills appeared.

  “You don’t walk drunk.”

  “And you don’t piss much for a guy.”

  “I’m afraid if I turn around you’ll disappear.”

  “I might.”

  “I know.”

  David Allan Coe came to life in the air, and he grinned and shook his head.

  “I’m ingratiating us with the natives. I’m putting them off guard so they’re too confused to attack during Madonna.” She lifted her hair off her neck and let it drop, watching him take two cigarettes from her pack. He waited to see if she would lean into it, and she did, putting her mouth delicately around the filter without breaking eye contact. “You are being very dirty.”

  “I could say the same of you.”

  Then her hands were on his collarbones, across his shoulders, down his waist, all business and thoroughness, and she came up with a lighter from his back pocket in under ten seconds, smirking at his startled face as she lit her cigarette.

  “You’re as tender as an officer with probable cause.”

  This made her laugh again, and he almost didn’t notice her glance at the clock as she threw back her drink.

  “Do you have to go?”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” she snapped. The fingers of her right hand drummed on the bar, and his eyebrows knitted. “What?”

  “Your voice lost its Minnie Mouse.”

  “And you lost your roll of duct tape. What’s your point?” Her face began to fold, just slightly, at the corners of her mouth and eyes. “Look, in here it’s the movies. We both know it’s not real.” She jerked a thumb toward the door. “Out there it’s Minnie Mouse and the need for restraints and corpses and DNA and reality. In less than two hours the lights on set are going down, and we both have to go back.” She searched his face and nodded, satisfied he understood.

  “DNA,” he whispered, thinking of the pockets he was emptying when he found this alley in the first place. “Do you love him?”

  “Now that sounds scripted. Maybe sometimes. We work together—it works somehow. I’m a monster and so is he. My choice of company is quite limited—it’s sort of like being from a very specific religious sect. A Mormon wants to be with another Mormon.”

  “Or many other Mormons.”

  She smiled and took a long drag off her cigarette. “Sometimes when the edges are fuzzy it seems like love. If I were outside looking in, I could believe it.”

  He folded his arms on the bar and laid his head on them, looking up at her. “A place where I used to live—it had these long, tall windows facing the street. Across from it was an antique store, and its front window was a Christmas scene all year long. It was made up like a living room—tree with lights and little glass ornaments, cardboard fireplace, armchairs, and hurricane lamps, even these little wagons under the tree with bows on them. My apartment smelled bad, and it was tiny, but I had a hard time leaving. When I’d wake up in the middle of the night and pass that window, I would see it from the corner of my eye and stop, and it was Christmas—warm, fuzzy Christmas like Christmas never really is—just for a minute. Beautiful and fake but almost worth putting up with the other shit.”

  “That would be it exactly.” Her face was blank and gorgeous, shock wiping it clean of emotion. She sighed. “I pop out for a bite and end up drunk and half in love in the bar where they filmed El Dorado and Hang ’Em High.”

  “Borderline” drew to a close, strange and soundtracky as it had been, and she said, delaying the silence that threatened to fall, “Quick, play me a song. You pick.” Snatching a ballpoint pen from near the register, she scribbled furiously on a napkin.

  He made a cursory sweep of the selections for something to change the tone, something to make her smile again.

  Because everything they were saying was true and not true. He pushed a button, the number nearly worn off, and upon returning slid his hand behind her head into all that hair and kissed her, rather desperate to make it all not true, to keep the end from being inevitable, Bobby Darin assisting in the background, upbeat about slashing, romance in his voice.

  Their mouths were wet and fit perfectly.

  “Can’t you taste the bodies between us?” she whispered, and he inhaled her words.

  “Come with me anyway.”

  “What does that mean? What movie are you in? This is a horror movie, not Alice in Wonderland. Or maybe it is. It’s all a dream, a dream of a chase. He won’t let me leave. I’ll never marry anyone else.” She wadded the napkin in her hand, working it into a smaller and smaller ball.

  “Married? You’re married?” He realized he was drunk, and things were a bit out of control, and his jacket was long lost, and Dave was eying them, as well as Male Patron and Female Patron, because they were becoming loud.

  “I’ll never be married at all,” she hissed, then snatched the knife, stabbing it through the third finger on her left hand. It stood straight up out of the wooden bar, dripping lime juice on the glove’s empty leather finger.

  Silence—thorough and anticlimactic silence.

  Bobby ended with a flourish, and Dave came over. He put one hand over hers and pulled the knife out with the other. “You two start being stupid, and I’m cutting you off.” He pointed warningly with it and retreated in a huff.

  Her jaw dropped. “Am I seriously that cute?”

  “So that explains the gloves. Can they sew it back on?”

  “He keeps it in his pocket.” She slid her hands out of the sticky gloves—the space between her fingers didn’t look particularly unnatural, so he didn’t stare. Her fingernails were chipped and a shade close to her shoes. “I feel like I need to pick something up on the way home—should I? Like flowers or some other kind of guilty offering? We can’t drag this out much longer.”

  “I’m starting to believe you pulled those shoes off a corpse.”

  “And I always believed the duct tape in your jacket was recreational.”

  “You can’t end it like this.”

  “You can’t end it like this. Why couldn’t we just be drunk and pretend to be normal and falling in love?” She tucked her cigarettes into her pocket, getting wearily to her feet.

  His hand locked around her wrist too tightly.

  She looked at it. “Really? Do you want to take it all the way back to the beginning? First intentions and everything?”

  “If it’s the only way.”

  Her eyebrows lifted; a smile twitched at the corners of her lips. “Then give me a twenty-foot head start.”

  “Ten.” He yanked her close to try and kiss her again.

  Resisting, she grinned as she pulled back and disappeared out the door in a flash of pink heels and blonde hair.

  His breath was uneven, but he was coming back to himself, saw his jacket at the other end of the bar. He would drain his drink—that would give her a fair chance.

  On the bar was the wadded-up napkin, stained with ink and lime.

  Uncrinkling it, their movie folded back around him:

  “Oh, shit.”

  Maybe it wasn’t lost. Maybe, maybe, maybe. He shoved the napkin into his pocket, grabbed his jacket, tossed some bills on the bar, and bolted for the door.

  Two steps out and he opened his mouth to call for her by name so she would know.

  He saw stars—the painful kind first, and as he went over backwards the real kind, a spattering visible in the sliver of sky between buildings.

  Duct tape was a painful binding material. In retrospect maybe if he had known this he would have been less cliché and more creative during conquests.

  These were his first thoughts as he came awake, twisting his hands behind him, but voices broke in to interrupt.
/>   “I think he’s a lovely present. I do. It’s just he’s so awfully banged up.”

  “I got excited. If I’d known you wouldn’t like him, I wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of getting him into the cab.”

  “But I do. You’re so hard to thank.”

  “And you’re hard to please.”

  The female voice was hers, but it was back to the high register, the innocent doe.

  He opened one eye. “Oh, Miss Lorelei Lee, why don’t you use your regular voice?”

  “Shut up! I won. You wanted to play; we played.” She rose from the high-back chair and crossed to him, face hard but eyes unsure.

  “I like you better pissed if you use your real voice. But one thing—this isn’t my duct tape.”

  Fighting a smile, she answered softly, “I thought it would be a nice touch. Normally I use plain old handcuffs.”

  “That sounds more fun.”

  He got a full-on grin from her this time and took the chance to get his bearings. He was taped to an office chair, and she must’ve used most of a roll—amateur but effective. This was a nice place, very nice. Bourgeois, modern, that glass and sterile look. The only thing that didn’t belong was her. She looked wild on the white carpet, with her pink shoes and torn black panty hose, hair ratted up in a knot on the back of her head.

  “I didn’t want to play,” he said. “I wanted us to fall in love and change everything—maybe not all at once but leave behind the duct tape and the handcuffs. Well, maybe not the handcuffs . . .”

  “Bullshit! If I hadn’t clocked you outside the bar, I’d be the one in tape right now.” She snatched a very pretty pistol from the table and pointed it at him with disturbing ease.

  “You’re gonna ruin the carpet,” he crooned.

  “She most certainly is not. Put that down, you little bitch. What is he talking about?” The competition appeared, the finger-stealing asshole, and he was wearing of all things a black turtleneck and a little ponytail.