My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

JOYELLE MCSWEENEY. The Warm Mouth

WARM MOUTH: CHINSCRAPER, WHY ARE YOU LYING THERE IN THE road with your jaw shoved back through your brain and your guts blown out as if you’d tried to swallow the highway?

CHINSCRAPER: Warm Mouth, I used to make my way along the median strips and trashy shoulders, my head in the vinyl noose of a six-pack, pop tabs gilding my teeth. I could steal the grease off a Taco John bag. Styrofoam was my bread. Oh, how far that good life seems from me now, laid out in this attitude of supplication, my head smashed in by a speeding Jeep!

WARM MOUTH: Truly I feel for you, Chinscraper, for I am also alone this night. Climb into my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.

WARM MOUTH: Kneescraper, why do you sit so still on that swollen chair which seems to breathe and groan all around you as if to swallow your small self?

KNEESCRAPER: It’s not a chair, it’s my grandmother’s body. Don’t worry, she’s not dead, just sleeping, and below her is the wheelchair, but you can’t see it for her girth. Maybe you’ve seen us neck deep in traffic or working our way across intersections like a fucked-up beetle, an evolutionary no-go, me in her lap and the motor straining to scoot us through the exhaust fumes with our groceries swinging from the arms: two-liters, Sno Balls, turkey jerky. She told me not to leave her but the night is so interesting with train tracks crisscrossing it like a game board and gilt-bellied delivery trucks slithering up to the gas stations. It’s so hard to keep my promise!

WARM MOUTH: Kneescraper, I too am curious about this night and so is my friend Chinscraper. Climb up in my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.

WARM MOUTH: Bentneck, why are you lying between the bed and the wall, stuffed into a few inches narrower than a grave, when the whole night spreads out dazzlingly beyond the Wooden Indian?

BENTNECK: Do I look pretty? It’s hard to speak twisted up like this. My mother brings me here to meet men. They like me in my princess nightie and sometimes I do a few ballet steps from my Barbie DVD. Afterward I get a treat — a Slurpee, and I can choose the color. I hardly ever drink it all before I fall asleep. Everything is not always very nice for me but eventually it is over. Tonight was different, though at first it was the same. And now I’m shoved down between the bed and the wall with all these carpet fibers up my nose and something wet on my head and my hair’s not very clean.

WARM MOUTH: Bentneck, we are also dirty, smashed up, bored, curious, and thirsty. Get up from under that bed, bad girl. Climb up into my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.

BENTNECK: From now on, I will be called Beauty, for I will narrate this tale. That night, the Warm Mouth conducted similar interviews with a shot-up dog, the suppurating shinbone of a horse, and a blue egg impaled on a stick. All climbed up into the Warm Mouth until its lower lip ballooned like a bullfrog’s and it grew harder and harder to move around. The stinking troupe tried to make camp on the walkway outside the public library, but hinges and bolts, bottle glass, and the plastic remains of a cheap pair of sunglasses littered the ground, irritating the Warm Mouth’s skin and threatening to pierce its distended lip.

WARM MOUTH: Ow!

CHINSCRAPER: Ow!

KNEESCRAPER: Owl!

BENTNECK: Wowl!

DOG: Bowel Wowel!

WOUND: Yowl!

EGG: Buy a vowel! BENTNECK: Ach, nothing’s free! Life’s a peep show, not a look-see!

BENTNECK: So they continued on. They came upon a shipwrecked motel in which people were sleeping behind blinds pinched or rifled or skewed in a pointed, irregular semaphore.

KNEESCRAPER: What does it signal? What can it mean? This pattern in the blinds and shades. This blind pattern. And how a gunshot’s made a sunburst of the cashier’s booth.

WOUND: You can’t make a pattern without shattering a few pasterns.

DOG: But not a very large gauge. And the cashier’s long since gone away. No cash changing hands here. These people are on the squat.

EGG: You can’t make a cat without swallowing a canary. You can’t make a Gatsby without firing a few gats.

CHINSCRAPER: Tell you what. I’m as worn out as a lobby rug. I’m falling apart here. Laid out flat. You can’t make a catcall without catching a few winks.

BENTNECK: Just then they detected a spray of light behind the rightmost room. They pressed closer to the glass, nearly bursting their viscous vehicle, peered through a chink in the blinds, and found themselves looking over the shoulder of a young man who was smoking and playing a boxing game on the TV. The room was bare and worn, but the troupe still thought it would be very nice to be inside lounging on the couch playing a boxing game instead of hunched up against the wall of a motel that looked ready to sink right through the ground. That is, it would be better to sink with the motel than fall in after it.

ALL: Sink Hole

Whack a mole

Bitch and moan

All roll home

We need the sink

We got the hole

We got the rust

We need the blood

We got the broke

We need the mold

All roll home, all roll home

A hole that will take

What we pour down its throat

At the end of the day

When daddy’s come home

Listen honey it’s been sweet

But I got honey of my own

I’m shunting it off

From a hole in my gut

I’ve got jars of the stuff

I’ve got problems of my own

BENTNECK: But now you’ve got only me. Byoo-tee.

BENTNECK: They were lost in this harmony when the young man relit his pipe and then, in a single motion, jumped up and swung around. He yanked at the blinds and peered out into the street. Then he pulled the blinds down so hard that they gave way from the ceiling on the right, exposing half the room. He went out of view and came back, tugging at his lower lip and rubbing at his gum.

YOUNG MAN:

Think and think

Thunk and thunk

Trunk and glove

Land the punch

Bury the pitch

Meat on meat

Whore on whore

Slunk and strove

Strunk and White

Struck and struck out

White light from light

Flight from white flight

Trove, trove

Soul’s trove

What God through me Hove

The bad night I was born

& became a lug

— Nut in this case

Historee.

Locked up with the screws and the bolts.

BENTNECK: But now you’ve got only me. Byootee.

BENTNECK: At that, finally, he looked down and saw them: some roadkill, a starving boy, a murdered girl, a shot-up dog, the suppurating shinbone, and the impaled egg, all tucked up inside the Warm Mouth, which was stretched so thin it was nearly transparent, a clear fluid traced with pus seeping from one corner. They all blinked at the young man through their wounds, and their shattered and cramped limbs shifted wetly. Then they all started talking at once, making a sound like an upended graveyard or a circular blade.

(All make a sound like an upended graveyard or a circular blade.)

BENTNECK: The young man clutched at his own rubbery face and then he screamed, though it sounded more like a croak. Then he crashed out through the thin door and past them into the night, which was starting to go a little gray at the seams as if it had been washed too much.

BENTNECK: Chinscraper, Kneescraper, Beauty, the shot-up dog, the shinbone, the impaled egg, and the Warm Mouth were startled to find before them the very sight they had fantasized: an open door. They dragged themselves inside and sat on the couch. They attempted to manipulate the controls of the boxing game. Then they closed the broken door and the broken blinds as best they could and dropped off into a noisome sleep. (All make barnyard noises.)

BENTNECK: Meanwhile day was dawning. The young man had run for a few blocks but was quickly winded. He climbed up onto a porch he knew and curled up under the remains of a swing that was hanging by one chain and made a kind of canted roof. As the day grew hotter the heat roused him from his cramped slumber, and he got up and banged on the door. He told his friend about his vision:

YOUNG MAN: I saw into the heart of me, I saw, like, into the heart of me, I saw beneath my, skin. I saw back into the, back of time, I saw like, out through the back of me, back through a hole in the skull of me, shot through a mouth in my skin, my life, like it had happened to me, the life, like, under my skin. And everything that would happen to me and everything I’d done like it had happened to me.

BENTNECK: His friend gave him a bump on credit, but also laughed at him.

FRIEND: Yeah man, but where’s the gun and where’s the stash? Where’s the gun and where’s the stash? Is it nestled up inside the shinbone of a horse, or sleeping in a smashed egg, or is it stuffed up in a murdered eight-year-old’s cunt? You better get your ass back over there if you love your life. Ash and stash, gash and snatch, love and life, cunt and gut, gun and gas. Run back. Run back.

BENTNECK: Did he love his life? The young man did not ask himself this question. He jumped up like a man in reverse and moved backward through the streets to the motel, all the way tilting away from it. He moved like rewound footage. He moved like across the moon. In this way he slowly slowly reached the door that he had fled. He could hear the video game cycling through its start-up screens. He could smell a morgue with broken air-conditioning, a rifled grave, roadkill, a suppurating wound, a stiffening body, a room full of sweat and sex, an unwashed child. He knew and recognized each of these smells. Perhaps he was not such a young young man. Plus an ooze was trickling all around his sneakers, green and foul, threaded with black. With held breath he tipped open the door.

BENTNECK: What he saw inside was a burst spectacle, a room filled with stinking pus, flaps of skin and tissue driven into the walls, a room that pulsed and seemed to be digesting a horrible gallimaufry, the fur, bones, and innards of an animal rotted beyond recognition, a boy so skinny his ribs, wrists, and leg bones had finally splintered through his flesh, a girl with bulging eyes and a wrung neck, a peltless dog whose every muscle was being slowly worked from the bone, a suppurating wound without a body left to speak of, bits of shell, tooth, hair, tongue, claw, and fat bobbing and resurfacing in the fuming fluid that bathed everything, bathed even his own eyes. Then he closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and he took it all into his mouth, the room and the world, the causes and their outcomes, the couch and the game, the gun and the stash, the fix and the flesh, the anger and the relief, the hope and the violence, the illusions of adulthood, chief among which is childhood, the growth and the decay, the decay and the rot, he took it into his mouth until his mouth was warm and leaked a little and bulged at the lip like a piteous frog’s.

This is Beauty speaking, with my warm mouth.