by Nicole Tsuno
Our mother doesn’t have a tongue, and how she came to be without it was a constant source of our fascination.
What happened to it? we asked her, to which she only shook her head, a too-steady smile spreading her face as she took turns cradling our chins, her devoted pets.
We lived in a hut so shabby that plants didn’t respect it, growing through it rather than around: snarls of branches punctured one window and exited another, climbers homed themselves on the roof and hung their roots down like tangles of hair. Mushrooms strained through the floorboards and when we scalped them underfoot, they shone pink and tumorous. In the mornings, we found our hair aged overnight, fluffs of seedpods clinging to their lengths, a feathery down. We were vessels for the forest, never bothering to remove them, letting the seeds fall and take root wherever they pleased.
Any neighbors unknown to us, a primary school out of the question, we were responsible for our entire education. At our disposal was a stack of five damp books with pages so fibrous that they came off in strings. One of these was a book of medical gores, which disappointingly made no mention of missing tongues. Still, we cracked the book open on our knees as we used our mother as our test subject. She submitted to our investigations, opening her mouth when we mimed opening ours. We tipped her head back and held her jaw down, her mouth a crowded cemetery of yellowing teeth.
At night she poured us teas made from forest scum, drinks tinted like bodily fluids. As the liquid broke against the basins of our stomachs, our mother retreated to her corner of the hut. When she fell asleep, we shucked our sheets and bowed our heads together, fabling how the tongue came to be lost. Clawed clean out by a jungle beast, we initially guessed. But why not just eat her, we hedged a few nights later. We revised. Some nights, it seemed plausible that our mother was a spy in hiding, punished for a secret found and lost, trapped inside her forever. That could explain her unjointed walk, and the way she could hollow out her face with shadows until it was almost gone.
When we got older, our speculations became less noble, hardened even. The dangers of being pretty, of what happens when the pretty are alone. A famine maybe, a starvation-fueled drive to the last bob of fruit, her tongue frozen to its meat in breathless hunger. During these conferences, it was impossible to ignore how our consonants popped and the weight of our own tongues, which heaved out of our mouths wet, sour, and very much alive.
Every few days, our mother left without preamble, a basket tucked in her elbow. When she left, we began our studies with increased urgency. We cuffed our wrists with our lips, stamping down our tongues to approximate her tonguelessness. I often had trouble keeping my tongue under my brother’s dry hand, so he would grab a bundle of my hair to still me. My brother’s tongue spent its days steeped in dewberries, so after it was my turn to hold, my hand returned to me with the hook of its purple. In a notebook, we recorded a list of the words we can say, words we learned to pronounce from a six-part cassette series called “The Juiceman.” The words we can say included mama, boo, boom, poo. The words we could not: good, going, goal, breeze, cheap, squeeze. When our mother was scheduled to return, we snapped our mouths back to their normal shapes, the lace of the skylight leaves freckling our closed faces with the last of the light.
When we were eight and ten, we learned to hold our throats in our hands and find more sounds: book, back, coop, comma (which could approximate “come on”). When we let go, we left necklaces that began to blue, our veins jumpy beneath the skin. Over dinner, our mother viewed our collars without saying anything. She tucked bites of food between her teeth, chewing with militaristic rhythm before probing each mass with a finger, swallowing only when it had satisfactorily disintegrated to paste.
At ten and twelve, we were old enough to start fishing. We perched on the edge of the stream, which only swelled to a proper river in the spring, when the ferns began to uncoil from their fetal positions. We watched the water ribbon out, chasing the shadows of the infrequent fish, hooking their gaping mouths on our fingernails. As their lives gulped out of them, we paid respect by nesting them within the bloodworts, white petals spoked with yellow. We unmoored one flower for each fish that we took, roots weeping an unsettling red down our forearms.
And then, we found a flower with a paler anchor. The root was curled up at its edges, dulled from dirt and dehydration, small insects bursting from its cavities. When we took it in our hands, we realized what it was: a tongue. We ran uphill, hot glee in our voices, the tongue slapping against my breast pocket. When we presented the tongue to her, she extracted the bugs from it and palpated it between her palms.
In the bucket that was our kitchen sink, she set the tongue afloat.
What will you do with it? we asked. When she didn’t move, we tried to tease a reaction from her, sending the tongue back and forth, a ship pleating the water.
The next morning, the tongue was gone, leaving dusted water in its absence. My brother and I cried out to each other before tugging her sleeves tight to scale her arms. Where did it go, where did it go, we chorused, our pulses thrilling, thumbing her bottom lip fat. Parting her lips like curtains, we opened her mouth.
Nicole Tsuno is a chronically-ill writer and graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, The Offing, and perhappened mag. She is a fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine. Some of her favorite things are as follows: dogs that look like their humans, anything peach, and toilets that play music.