Author's Note: I thought I would try my hand at flash fiction today. It's a bit experimental, so let me know if you'd like to see more like this in the future.
When she was young, this is what they told her: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” She would repeat this tale to herself, over and over.
When she was less young—though of course, so young she still was—she was told this again: “He teases you because he wants a reaction from you.” This enlightened her. Swiftly, she put a stop to reckless emoting.
Now she is older than so very young—the kind of aging young that has so much time to get old that the taste of her youth is a terrifying cliff that she stands on. She is at that age where she must carry a boulder until the day she can make a landmark of its stone. Know that at this age, she is marginally better at starting difficult conversations with the people she cares for. This, she realizes, is likely a part of life, but these conversations are not difficult because she is bearing bad news. Well, perhaps she is; after all, she is standing at the edge of a cliff.
At this moment (at the edge of a cliff), she is talking to a lover. He brings her flowers, and tells her she is beautiful as their legs entangle under the sheets. But from his lips leave other things, and one evening, it tramples over a body. He is on the phone, and he uses a word.
It drops, as though it weighs nothings, and yet her tongue is a rock in her stomach. What are the words she would use to describe this feeling? Discomfort? Disappointment? How should she find the right words to respond when her mouth is only a river, and they have asked her not to babble?
“You can’t say that,” she tells him over the crackle of fat burning.
He’s standing over the stove now. There’s only a glance from over the dishtowel on his shoulder when he asks: “What do you mean?”
He makes her dinner. He brings her flowers.
It isn’t his word. She thought this was obvious? Of course, this was not the first time something had seemed obvious to one and not the other. She had been seated at this side of the dinner table before.
Her voice peers at the man from behind her teeth. She says it plainly, outside of herself: “It’s not your word.”
“People don’t own words,” he replies, surely.
And yet she knew plenty. Words that belonged to him, and not to her; words that belonged her, and not to him; even words that belonged to neither of them, which is what this particular word was that she had informed him was not his. There was no rulebook that existed, of course, no law that explained it, but biting into the meal she had thanked him for, she knew it was true.
Truthfully, her tongue had only dreamt—in sick fantasies, to be sure, where what she was taught and what she has learnt collided—of tasting words that his mouth so easily ate up. In fact, he was doing it now: eating up words that were meant to leave her mouth, meant to kiss her lips.
He does the dishes. He rubs her feet.
Now he is fucking her. It is desperate, and searching—for what, permission? Forgiveness?—with his mouth on her ear. But she does not hear her name in his whispers; it is no longer the sound of their bare feet tapping on the floor in an amateur waltz, or the echo of “Moon River”. Just the word. Over and over. The word fucks her with its mouth over and over.
“What about when they say it?”
They, she thinks, fingers grasping at the pillow under her head. “It’s . . . different,” she explains to the ceiling. “It’s their word.” It is between her thighs that he laughs at her. This is the closest she’s come before with him.
“It’s just a word, baby.”
She wonders if she screams at him if it will just sound like sex. She wonders what names could she call him and get away with it, or what word it would take it hurt him. Did he mean what he said? Did he think words were “just”?
When he finishes, she goes to the bathroom. She has to shower to get it off. And in her mind, for the briefest second, things are silent. Blissful.
But in the whine of the pipe growing hotter, she hears another sound. Not the patter of water falling off her back, or the squeak of her toes on the sudsy acrylic floor. She could not hear the choke of her gargle and spit if she wanted to. What she hears, instead, is him. That word.
She realizes it is on her now—it has to be. Somewhere, branding her like a calf. He must have left it on her, somehow, somewhere, because she can still hear it. She looks and she looks, pulling at hairs and skin, but it is not on her arms, or her legs, or her neck, or her back, even though these are the places he has just been. Somewhere she could not see, somewhere she could not reach, he has left her with the word.
Now, he is outside the door. He knocks. He asks: “Can I come in?”
She doesn’t hear him, though. For every syllable he speaks, the word takes its place.
Inside her? she wonders frightfully. It can’t be. And yet she’s checking! She feels around, blind and wet and shameful. Except the word isn’t there, either. Why would it be; this had always too shallow a place, he’d said so himself.
“Baby?”
This is what is must be like to taste the words he eats, she thinks. What she has yet to realize, of course, was that she eaten the word herself.
It had been there, played in her mouth and moved over the plaque of her teeth. The word was right there, in the rise of her bile, in the sucking of her spit. She had swallowed it whole.
She thought he taken the words that were meant to leave her mouth, but these words were still hers. She had swallowed them whole.
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