“Whatever is in the heart will come up to the tongue.” Persian Proverb
I like it here. The room is smaller than my apartment, but not much. The only people talking to me are the guards or the doctor, and if I ignore them they eventually go away. As long as I take the medication, that is. That’s ok, they cant stop me with a few pills. I’m much stronger than that.
This is definitely better than other places I have been. Not like the hospital, with all the patients and the nurses and the psych techs bothering you constantly. I can just sit here all day and listen to my friends inside my head.
Before I got here there were so many distractions. Always someone trying to interact with me and force me to hear their stupid thoughts put into words. Why everyone was born with a tongue I have no idea. You should have to take an I.Q. test in order to get one, in my opinion. Imagine the world if we didn’t have to listen to stupid people go on and on about stupid things. Like themselves, mainly.
I grew up with doctors and counselors and group home administrators speaking to me every day for hours, their fleshy tongues flapping around in their mouths like trout on a dry riverbed. I never understood why they wasted their time, like they believed suddenly I would decide to think like a dumb fuck and say “OH! Now I see! You make so much sense now! Why didn’t I see it before?” Instead I would just sit there and imagine cutting out that annoying muscle that was dancing between their teeth and eating it as I watched their mouths fill with blood and their eyes filled with horror. I rarely responded when they talked to me. If I did, I think I would have had a much tougher time growing up. The things I wanted to say would have gotten much more attention than my silence.
A few times I did speak up. I spent a few years in a boys home in Boston where a priest by the name of Father O’Rourke spent hours reaching out to the wayward souls in hopes of saving at least one of us from the emptiness of life in the system. Emptiness is pristine in my opinion, so when he asked me to sit with him I asked him to let me cut off his head first. “So I can shove it on the end of a pike,” I told him when he tried to shake off the shock and ask me why. “That way we can talk for hours but I don’t have to hear you say a thing.” Then I spit on him and told him his mother speaks to me from hell.
I was eight years old. Quickly I learned that speaking my mind, no matter how bad I wanted to, would only lead to trouble. At least Father O’Rourke never bothered me again.
It took a long time, but eventually I found myself with some form of independence. I learned to do what I had to do to pass for what this hated world called “normal” and was moved to an apartment building shared with other unwanted outcasts cramped into small studio apartments like abandoned pets at the SPCA. I cooked my own meals, washed my own clothes, bought my own food, but the state made sure they sent their watchdogs every day to reassure that I hadn’t gone off the deep end and started hiding bodies in the floorboards.
Each caseworker was more annoying than the next. Constant questions that I was expected to answer, prying into my private thoughts. Silence wouldn’t work, or else I would be deemed unfit to care for myself and it would be back to the hospital or a group home, with much less privacy and much more questions. So, I played ball. They’d ask me how I felt. “Fine,” I’d say. They’d ask if I was taking my medication. “Yes,” I’d say. Have I made any new friends? “I have,” I would reply. “His name is Legion, for he is many.”
I spent years in that same apartment, keeping it clean but not immaculate, never wanting to appear like an obsessive psychopath needing to be meticulous, one step away from strangling puppies or sorority girls. I just went about my days and nights, carrying on conversations in my head with the friends I have grown to know so well. Caseworkers came and went, some moving on to better jobs, some feeling disturbed by me and requesting to be reassigned I am sure. That was just fine, though. I had enough friends inside my head. Every human I encountered struck me as a foolish waste of flesh, taking an animal and infusing it with emotion to create a crippled, flawed being incapable of anything but foolishness and embarrassment. The last caseworker decided he wanted to break through my defenses and be my friend, however. No matter what the cost.
What a poor choice on his part.
He introduced himself as Chuck, and shook my hand with a vigorous pumping action, locking his eyes on mine with the bright and cheery intent of someone that wants to become fast friends. I hated him immediately. He had more questions than a game show host, asking about my likes and dislikes, my hopes and dreams. I tried giving him the rehearsed answers but he wasn’t having any of that. This guy wanted to get down to my core; to my soul. He thought he could save me.
Venom came spewing up from that core which he sought to know so well, and as I watched his meaty jowls move up and down I realized that the time I had waited for my entire life was finally at hand. I was told from the time I could remember that I would be a part of the cleansing. A part of the scourge that moved across this planet, bringing blood and murder to mankind with a hatred and brutality they had only seen in glimpses. Chuck was here as a sacrifice, and I was supposed to cut out his tongue.
I stood up as he was in mid-sentence and said “Thank you”. He looked up, a bit surprised, and I pulled out the knife I kept tucked in the waist of my jeans with one hand and grabbed a handful of his hair with the other. His hands immediately went up defensively to block his face, and I plunged the blade through his palm and into the soft flesh of his neck. He began to scream, but I released the knife and grabbed his hair with both hands and began to slam his head violently into the concrete floor beneath us. As he lay unconscious, I cut his throat and then cut out his tongue.
I felt years of anticipation wash away as I hacked away at him. It was better than I hoped, the feeling of the razor sharp steel slicing through flesh, the warm blood running down my chin as I chewed on his tongue. This is what I was here for. Silencing the talking sheep, putting an end to their blather.
Tongue is impossible to chew up unless it’s cooked, and I wasn’t really hungry, so I spit it on his corpse and enjoyed the experience for a bit. Eventually my friends began to speak to me, telling me I had to make sure I wasn’t caught. Someone would be waiting home for him, they said. Anyone as kind and caring as this fool would surely have a wife at home, eating up every word he had to say like M&Ms. I got his ID from his wallet and took his keys from his jacket, helping myself to his car. A hybrid. It figured.
I sat for a few hours outside his small house, and eventually his wife came home with an armload of groceries. I gave her a minute to make it into the house and then followed behind her, letting myself in the door with Chuck’s key. The moment she saw me, she immediately started screaming and pissed herself all over her tan khakis. That’s when I remembered I forgot to wash my face.
What a sight I must have been; bloody mouth, knife in hand. It did made things much easier, however. She was frozen in shock and barely put up a fight. A few scratches on my face, but I kind of liked it. Her tongue was out and in my mouth soon enough, an experience I now know I would need again and again and again.
As I left the kitchen I noticed the collection of hallmark cards on the counter. “Congratulations”, they said. “A new baby”. Two for the price of one. I thought about going inside her for the little one’s tongue, but she couldn’t have been more than a month or two pregnant so even finding the tongue on a fetus that small would have been nearly impossible. Like surgery on a stewed tomato. I just took satisfaction in the fact that it would never get to use it.
This time I did stop to clean my face up, a choice which proved to be my undoing. Apparently in a neighborhood like this, when someone shrieks bloody murder people actually call the cops. I exited the front door and was greeted with two police cars screeching to a halt in front of the house. They jumped out and began to question me as to why I was there, hands resting firmly on their weapons.
I once heard Father O’Rourke tell someone that “the truth shall set you free”. Nonsense, but maybe it worked on these goodie goodies. It was worth a shot, since one of the officers was already making his way inside the house and would soon see the truth for himself. “Cutting the tongue out of some dumb bitch”, I told them, which promptly got me tackled and shackled.
So now here I sit. The correctional facility for the criminally insane. I wont be here long, though. My friends assure me of that. They tell me I will be transformed. That I will break free from this prison and from my earthly body. Then I can join their ranks and do the works I was meant to do.
All I have to do is chew off my tongue.
It was hard to breathe. She had been dreaming of running up a flight of stairs, up and up, but never reaching the top. Higher and higher she would climb, but each step she took would take her no closer to the light at the highest point of the staircase. Her lungs were now begging for air, but it was difficult to answer the request for some reason.
Panic set in. Janice thrashed as hard as she could, but only succeeded in hurting herself. Both her feet were tied as well, firmly secured to the foot of the steel metal frame of the bed. The ropes bit into her flesh as she pulled and pushed and thrashed as best she could, but nothing happened. Tears welled behind the tape and began to burn her eyes, mixing with the glue of the heavy duty tape and irritating the sensitive tissue of her eyelids. Her flesh burned where the bindings cut through the skin, and her eyes stung. Her throat was raw from forcing throaty screams that, although requiring much energy, would most likely have not been very audible thanks to the fact that her mouth was sealed shut. Eventually Janice stopped fighting and simply went limp.
She pulled again on the ropes tied to her legs, but gently this time. They were firmly secured, but the bed frame itself was not of the most sturdy construction. The steel feet scraped against the floor, making a sound which sounded like concrete. The echo was hollow and dead, her ears telling her the room was large and lightly furnished. It was most likely a basement, judging from the concrete floor and the smell of mildew and earth that was now registering in her nose. That fact send a new surge of fear, just knowing that she was below ground already; a grave of sorts prepared for her before she was even dead.
