Philomela – by Orana Loren
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
Nobody comes here anymore. This place is secret. We were the first people to step foot in this room for one hundred years.
I knew that if I brought you here, there would be nothing alive to watch us. I knew that the vines that hang over the windows would be dead. No moss would be growing on these glassless walls, no lichen on these flagstones. There would be the old canopied bed in the centre of the room; and the antique mirror, cracked a little. But I knew that there would be nothing living in this room but you and me.
I brought you here so that the deadness of the walls would whiten your tongue. Your tongue was always too fleshy for me, too pink-flashing. I could never look at your lips for long; they were always too full and swollen with honey, and the edges curved when you smiled – curved up, you know? But when I brought you here, your tongue did not stop. Each time you grinned I saw river-pink, a young-blood pink, a new-skinned pink, the thickest water. Pink over pink over pink, in and out went your tongue; then your breath, and your breath, and your tongue. The thickest pink.
When I left you there, you were cutting out your tongue with a piece of mirror. Flash of slick pink, flash of glass, pink flash of tongue, flash of sharp, and your tongue grinned, and the whole writhing mass of it fell to the floor. Tonsillitis, cancer. Your dead voice, you couldn’t use it. Better to stick it squirming between your thighs and taste yourself – better to cut it out: fleshy, bulbous, wet and full and shivering almost as much as you. I was afraid to touch you. Because the tongue was a part of you, still; it was so full of hot blood, as full as your cheeks and your thighs. I was afraid to be seen with you, because you were flesh and I was flat and transparent.
And then red –
from your mouth, from your lips, you dribbling red blood and dangerously pulsating. It was what you had always wanted, for red to take you over. You knew that once that red rushed down your chin, your whole life would be rewritten because that red was who you were,
dark tangle of your tongue, purple domes of your breasts,
your hands tied with tongues,
your feet tied with tongues,
your tongue tied.
I watched you cut out your tongue in front of the mirror, and it was entirely your fault. ▼
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