Burnt Tongues Read online

  Mirrored, like the back of our scarred heads—his double dare to me vaulting off swing sets, my triple dare to him backflipping off seesaws.

  Twinned, like our February 29 leap year birthdays.

  “I just wish this was mine,” he said, making his raised scar a fist.

  He was fed up of living in my shadow; now it’s me that lives in his. If you can call it living: my days now spent gorging on humble pumpkin pie on this morbid road trip, where the ultimate day trip is dying, and the greatest five-star package is death.

  All piss and vinegar, my brother used to punch kids to leave dead arms. Now it’s dead bodies the Astounding Jackass leaves as he jumps ship from one cluster to the next . . .

  Repeating stunts at the next location hot spot . . .

  Decreeing himself the first outlier, the trailblazer—the Exceptional Copycat . . .

  It’s then I—we—suddenly stutter to a halt, tripping, kicking the heels in front.

  The Ghoulfriend turns around to glare. “Watch out,”

  she says.

  We’re now nearly full circle, back at The 8 Lives of 9, feet muddied stiff and hands numbed dead. Before I can reply, Jack interrupts me to thank everyone for coming.

  My eyes roll up into their sockets when he mentions souvenirs. He then asks, “Any last requests?”

  I throw my hand up—like I’m back at school and all teacher me-me-first against my brother. Back when we were fighting to be each other’s first accident.

  Overpranking to be each other’s Patient Zero.

  On overkill, dying to be the first lemming.

  %

  “Yeah,” I say, pointing across to that cordoned-off tree on the village green. “What do you know about the first victim?”

  In the silence the tour group scowls at me and heads shake, like somehow I’m the bad guy.

  Jack holds my gaze, his eyes narrowing, searching mine. Tour guides always get uppity when asked about the latest copycat, cluster, or hot spot affecting their route. My modus operandi is to wait for Q&A at the end of walks on blah, blah autopilot, hoping they’ll trust me and not tip off the police about my curiosity.

  Looking to The 8 Lives of 9 pub—with its beaten kitty-cat signage hanging overhead—we all know what happened to that cat.

  And Schrödinger’s.

  “How about for a chestnut?” I prompt, popping another cold one into my mouth, jiggling the withered paper bag at him.

  Jack smiles at me like an old friend. Wanting to borrow money. “Not even for a chestnut.”

  I tell the epic letdown it’s important. “It’s about my brother. He likes starting tours.” I point to his jack-o’-lantern still grinning in the dark. “Like yours.”

  When we were growing up, most kids guessed through the alphabet to remember my brother’s name. We were a double-edged seppuku sword to our parents, our teachers—celebrating and praising present me, mourning and ignoring invisible him, sweeping any talent of his under the carpet, locking any achievement away inside a box.

  Sealed, like a Copenhagen coffin.

  If I’ve learned anything, it’s that bucking a trend is

  impossible when everybody else is doing it.

  Like Werther, to just stop copycatting.

  “Competition?” Jack swaggers towards me, rubbing the lid of his black box player, his irises flickering with lantern orange. “Nonsense. I have merchandise and a foolproof gimmick.”

  What if this is preemptive karma? Me, my brother, two sides of the same coin. Entangled. With the sins committed in this life—the trouble caused, the pain inflicted—coming back to haunt us.

  Trap us. A bizarre Brothers Grimm fairy tale acted out, jinxed or punished by God.

  Jack leans in kiss close to whisper, “Purchase a souvenir, and perhaps I’ll remember something.”

  “Something you’re dying to know.” I smell Jack’s sinusy stink, feel his murder mac’s brushed leather touch my leg, as he taps his nose in poor pantomime and winks.

  Yet what if that sin, jinx, or punishment turned out to be a talent, which was not dying? You’d probably shit a brick—a cassette brick, playing hokey horror music.

  “Something you’d kill to keep quiet.” Jack hushes his cracked lips with a finger.

  “About this dear brother of yours,” he trails off, waltzing away, taking the tour group with him.

  It’s not until my teeth stab with ache that I realise I’ve stopped chewing.

  That my jaw’s dropped, my mouth fallen open to Echmond’s icy Hallowe’en night.

  As I follow Jack over to The 8 Lives of 9’s amber safety, and it’s now I really pay attention to his tour.

  And toss another plasticky chestnut.

  To understand this talent I share with my brother, imagine a coin tossed ten times. And with every coin toss it always lands tails. Ten consecutive tails will take nine hours of trying—a day bored trying to make sense of this limbo. But with every toss, time also branches and divides itself between two paths—an alternate outcome, lifetime, or universe you’re unaware of where the coin landed on heads.

  Because all you’ve ever known in life is tails—and tails never fails.

  “Buy your souvenirs!” Jack whips open his mac, the lining teeming, tinkling with amber from dozens of cassettes. “Buy your narrated ghost tour tapes here!” he booms.

  And let’s just get this straight: I’m not a ghost. I don’t see dead people.

  But instead of coin tossing for just nine hours, consider your whole life. Those toss outcomes instead being dangerous games of chance, life-or-death decisions, like stabbing arteries in your hand or power socket pips.

  Scenarios with fifty-fifty chances of survival—like somersaulting off seesaws or loop-the-looping from swing sets onto your skull, accidentally taking your own life as some banal illusionist—the Brilliant Nappy Face. For every incident you probably didn’t survive, there’d be as many alternate lives where you improbably did.

  Like branches of a tree—shaped like an inverted L—each twig an outcome dividing into a forest of scabbed-up veins. That one branch destined for tails forever, no matter how hard you try in many worlds—or the Copenhagen interpretation—to change it.

  Pretty impossible but possible.

  What mathematics experts with letters after their names will call probability—or improbability.

  What science geniuses with more letters after their names than in them—like scary statistical witch doctors—will call quantum suicide.

  And by extension—like dreaded decimal voodoo priests—quantum immortality.

  So what if a Hallowe’eny thought experiment then turned out to be true, instead of a far-fetched ghost story?

  What if you were destined to survive death with only a quark of maths on your side—always surviving when you least expect it, when you least accept it—all because your life is that tossed coin, forever landing tails side up?

  “Relive the experience!” Jack flaunts the drama haunting his bones deeper than just am-dram theatre. “In this life or the next!” he blahs, his grin matching the jack-o’-lantern’s.

  The Christian belief is that to take your own life is a sin against God, and for it you walk the earth eternally cursed.

  Cursed and unable to die. Never dead dead—like me or my brother, resurrected Zombie Jesus, that Jack-of-the-

  Lantern trickster.

  Maybe even Jack the Day-Tripper, and I nom another chestnut.

  “Are those roast chestnuts?” the Ghoulfriend says, looking to the bag I can’t feel. “Or horse chestnuts?” Horse chestnuts being the conker kind, the kind me and my brother would rap each other’s knuckles with until welted purple, before we started dying.

  Why? I toss another into my mouth and offer her the bag bought from a street vendor who doesn’t know his suicide from his soufflé, his quantum from his quiche. I ask, “Do you want to play conkers?”

  “My mum’s a doctor.” Her bunched cleavage heaves proud. “Horse chestnuts are poisono
us. Haemolysis.” The toxins that rupture and destroy red blood cells or erythrocytes. “They might kill you,” she boasts.

  Staring at her chest, masticating another cold chestnut, I say, “I doubt it.”

  My tongue probes my gums and teeth for nutty shards and pulp. Even if they are horse chestnuts, it’d be just another miracle stunt to add to mine and that Wicked Dullard’s growing list of party tricks.

  “Weirdo,” she huffs, dragging her boyFiend with her.

  I shrug.

  Even though that Spectacular Bastard’s up to no good, he’s still my brother. How quantum quick guilt catalyses hatred, it’s no wonder families become so f%ked-up.

  The real curse is being flesh and blood.

  “Be the first to scare your family and friends to death!” booms Jack, as tourists hang on his coattails, scrambling to get their picture with him and The 8 Lives of 9. His plastic audio wares rattling like imitation ghost chains shoo them away, the dog walkers unleash their mutts across Echmond’s village green, and the GhoulFiends head back towards the residential jack-o’-lanterns. What if purgatory wasn’t fire in your veins and creepy endless dark but instead something equally punishing? Like a family day out or a caravan holiday away.

  Chasing your brother over mediocre towns in a lame limbo of tourism—forced to live when you want to die—still chasing the Astonishing Deviant years later across village greens . . . through Woodland Trust trees . . . via quantum suicide . . . blah, blah, blah . . .

  And What If you were just lucky all along? This maths-science mumbo jumbo nothing more than a miscalculated belief system. A flawed religion. Fortunate and stupid, when one day my brother’s luck might run out, and I won’t have to stalk the Terrific Dicksplat out of sibling rivalry . . . at Hallowe’en . . . questing for quantum immortality . . . blah, blah, bl—

  It’s then there’s a piercing scream—sharp like a knife wound. Then barking.

  Way too much barking.

  I turn like everyone else to the village green, where one of the dog walkers covers her mouth in front of the hangman tree, her eyes wide and white.

  Above her a deadweight hangs from the lowest scabbed branch. Fancy dressed in black-and-white stripes, peroxide hair flapping, the jacket’s upturned collar hiding the slipknot.

  Another tragic hero, another wannabe Werther.

  Another lemming: Echmond’s sixth. After Brichford—another copycat, cluster, and hot spot CV credit for

  my brother.

  This time I don’t roll my eyes. This time I just close them.

  Three incantations of BeetleKurt won’t bring him back. It won’t bring any of them back. And I’m such a hypocrite, but if I do catch my brother, I really will brain the Glorious Coward Weasel.

  This time I swear, I really will give him something to die about.

  But out here in the creepy dark of this dying autumn—suicide tourists or accidental lemmings—some of us were born to live forever.

  The Routine

  Keith Buie

  At eight thirty a man drags his three sons back to the pharmacy, slams three prescriptions down on the counter, and says to make it quick.

  “We’ve been at the emergency room for four hours.” He smacks a pack of bubble gum out of the youngest son’s hand. “I have to get home. The play-offs start at nine.”

  Amoxicillin, rubber-stamped in large black letters, lines the center of each prescription. The doctors at Huron Hospital all keep fill-in-your-name antibiotic prescription pads in their lab coat pockets.

  The father scratches at red bumps on his neck. It could be a rash, but my guess is razor burn. Razor burn that he shaves over every day and only makes worse.

  He keeps scratching his neck. “I told that nurse we needed three amoxicillin prescriptions. Same as last time. But we still had to wait four hours and pay a hundred dollars just for some doctor to look in their ears for five seconds.”

  When I ask how often the boys get ear infections, the father spanks the middle son for jamming cotton balls in his mouth and says, “This is their third ear infection this year.”

  Seventy five percent of all children develop an ear infection by age three, their shorter Eustachian tubes between the ear and throat allowing easy entry for bacteria and viruses.

  When I ask whether his sons have a runny nose or a cough, or more importantly if they have a fever, he smacks his oldest son for ripping pages from the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and says, “Just fill the prescriptions and stop asking so many questions.”

  Viruses cause the majority of ear infections. However, a fever indicates infecting bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae or Haemophilus influenzae, which can lead to mastoiditis, perforation of the eardrum, and in rare cases spread to meningitis.

  After typing each prescription, slapping on labels, and mixing three bottles of bubble-gum-flavored amoxicillin, I walk over to the cash register, put my head down, and ask if he has any questions.

  He points to the forty-five-dollar total on the register. “Yeah, why does it cost so much?” Then he dumps a pocketful of change onto the counter and lights up a cigarette.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” I tell him.

  “Try and stop me,” he says, blowing smoke in my face.

  Risk factors for children developing ear infections include upper respiratory infections, being bottle-fed instead of breast-fed, and exposure to cigarette smoke.

  The father snatches the bag out of my hands and dumps two bottles onto the counter. “I’m only buying one. The boys can share.”

  I want to look him in the eyes and say each child needs the full ten-day treatment to completely kill any infecting bacteria, or else he’ll be back in two weeks complaining about their fourth ear infection this year.

  Instead I keep my head down and say he should probably buy all three, that maybe it would be best to follow the doctor’s instructions.

  He slides fifteen dollars in quarters, dimes, and nickels toward me. “Where’s the other pharmacist? He always keeps his mouth shut.” Then he scratches his neck again.

  In rare cases infected razor burn can induce a fever and swell into pus-filled carbuncles deep in the skin that cause bacteremia.

  But his three sons have finally finished ransacking the pharmacy, so I don’t say anything that might keep him here any longer.

  “Kids. Car. Now,” he yells, smacking each one on the back of the head as they knock over a Kleenex display on their way out the front door. “If I miss the first pitch, I swear I’m going to beat . . .”

  Abusive, chain-smoking fathers are always in a hurry.

  I’m a pharmacist, but most nights, I’m also a verbal punching bag.

  I walk over to the sink and turn on the water. I push down on the soap dispenser three times, vigorously rubbing the glob of orange antibacterial soap over every inch of my hands. My skin dries, and my knuckles crack with the constant washing.

  After drying my hands, I sit down on the stool, open up my Pharmacology 101 textbook, and resume studying.

  Side effects of amoxicillin overdose are hallucinations, seizures, and encephalopathy.

  The clock on the wall says it is 8:45. Only seven hours and fifteen minutes to go.

  Because at four o’clock all of this comes to an end.

  In a twenty-four-hour pharmacy one of two pharmacists works the graveyard shift. This starts at eight o’clock at night and runs to eight in the morning. It lasts for seven straight days, followed by seven days off. Twenty-six guaranteed weeks of vacation every year.

  At least that’s what it says in my contract.

  This is my sixteenth straight week without a day off. One hundred and twelve days. Twelve hours every day. Eighty-four hours each week.

  All here in this pharmacy. My home away from home.

  Two pharmacists normally rotate the weekly shifts. But Ron, the other night pharmacist, the tan, blond, fresh-out-of-college heartthrob who looks more suited for a lifetime of modeling, hasn’t been able to work for
months.

  Ron swims laps at the rec center every morning after his shift. He shaves his legs to speed up his lap time or maybe just to relive his Junior Olympic swimming days. One day he shaved too deep and cut a gash in his leg. He got in the pool, and whatever bacteria were floating in that chlorinated water found their way into his cut. A week later boils formed around the cut. After another week the boils grew into carbuncles, popped open, and started oozing thick, yellow pus. Two weeks after that he couldn’t stand on his leg. The day he fell down clutching his chest and gasping for air is when the ambulance took him to the hospital. He spent the first month in intensive care, hooked up to intravenous antibiotics, before falling into a coma.

  Doctors diagnosed it as a coma produced from pneumonia caused by a blood staph infection triggered by a laceration in his leg.

  The dirty, white lab coat Ron wore every night and never washed still hangs on the wall in the back of the pharmacy. The brownish-green splotches on the sleeves almost look like tiny bacteria chewing their way up the coat, one strand of

  cotton at a time.

  My district manager asked me to help out the company and work a little overtime. He said I owed them anyway since what happened last year. And it was fine, he said, because I was still legally available to work.

  I asked if having me work more was in the company’s best interests since my little . . . incident.

  He said to just keep showing up and he’d let me know when I could have a day off. That was four months ago.

  That was the last time I remember sleeping.

  Customers see the four months of insomnia screaming out of my bloodshot eyes. They see it in the uncombed hair and perpetual five o’clock shadow. They see it in my pale, hollowed-out face from skipping two out of three meals each day.

  And they have no problem letting me know about it.

  “You look drunk.”

  “You look like death.”

  “Where’s the real pharmacist?”