We Make Mud

Boy’s Tongue: Revisited

One day Boy, that boy born without a tongue on the inside of his boy mouth, he walked up to us brothers, down by the river where us brothers we were standing doing us our fishing, and he held out to us brothers his boy hand closed up like it was to make itself into a fist. For you, Brothers, Boy mouthed these three words out, and then he opened up his closed-up fist. In Boy’s hand, Boy held out to us brothers what looked like to us to be Boy’s tongue. He held it, like this, in his hand, like you would a fish out of water, Boy held it out, like this, out for us to see it like this, the way you might hold a fish too small to keep. That’s what Boy’s tongue, sitting there in the palm of his boy hand, that’s what it, Boy’s tongue, looked like to us brothers: like a fish too small to keep. But what would us brothers do when a fish too small to keep had died in our boy hands, had breathed its last breath with one of our silvery fishing hooks hooked deep down into the insides of its fish belly? Sometimes what us brothers would do to a not big enough fish like this, we’d walk with it, in our hands, out into the river, and we’d hold it, like this, in the river, like this, until the river’s muddy waters brought the fish back into its own life. It was the river that taught us brothers this: that nothing ever really dies. So, us brothers, we walked, like this, with Boy’s tongue, in our hands, out into the river’s muddy waters. We held it, this fish, us brothers, like this, into the river, under the river’s muddy water, and we stood there like this, we watched Boy’s tongue, like this, it just laid there, like this, songless, in our hands, our hands with the river flowing between them, until all of the fish that live and swim in the river, they swam up to it, this dead fish of a tongue, and what they did then, these fish of the river, these fish that were still very much alive, they opened up with their fish mouths and, no, they did not start to sing, though it’s true that us brothers, this is what we wanted them to start to do: no, what they did, then, these fish, was, these fish, they opened up their mouths and started to eat. These fish nibbled with their fish mouths on the tip of Boy’s dead fish of a tongue as if it was a fish left there for them, given to them like this, by the river for them to eat it — this, to keep this dead fish in some way alive. There were fish lined up upriver from where, us brothers, we were standing, out there in the middle of the river, all the way up to where the steel mill, it was sitting all quietly shipwrecked in the riverbank’s rivermade mud. By the time the moon rose, it was just barely rising up out of the river, there was nothing more left of Boy’s tongue for us brothers to hold onto. Us brothers, when Boy’s tongue, when there was nothing left of it for us to hold onto it with, we walked back out of the river and we headed ourselves back to the back of our backyard. We were on our way back to the back of our backyard, with our buckets half empty of fish, when we heard a sound, it was calling us brothers, Go back, brothers, go back and to the river go. When we turned back toward that sound and walked ourselves back to where the river was, we could see that this sound, it was the fish in the river making these go to the river sounds. Boy walked up to us then, again, and he stopped and he stood in front of us brothers, his face facing away from the river, and then, like this, Boy opened up his mouth at us brothers to speak. Boy’s mouth, that hole in his face that he fed food into, that hole where sometimes some mouthy sounds might come grunting out, in that hole, when Boy opened it up at us brothers, like this, inside of it, us brothers, we could see what we knew it, it was a fish, there on the inside of Boy’s mouth, right in there where a tongue, a tongue there ought to be. When Boy opened up his mouth like this at us brothers, Boy and the fish on the inside of his boy mouth, they started to sing, the both of them, like this, Boy and Boy’s fish tongue, they were singing into the faces of us brothers. Us brothers, standing there like this, we gave each other a look. There was this look that us brothers, we sometimes liked to look at each other with this look. This look, it was the kind of a look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look. This boy here, Brother said, looking at me with this look. This fish here, Brother said to me. They’re a couple of keepers, Brother said. If you say so, I said to Brother. And then I fished out my fishing knife from inside my trouser pocket, and I cut off this boy’s head.