THE MOUTH — MATT LEIBEL
/Things came out of the mouth that were not supposed to come out of the mouth: words the mouth was not supposed to know; words the mouth knew but knew it was not supposed to say out loud; interjections that, once released into the universe (defined here as the world beyond the mouth, beyond all mouths, the air we had not yet breathed), could not be taken back; little bits of spittle the viscosity of raw rubber; tiny bird-like whistles the mouth shaped into tiny birds and tiny whistles. The mouth, after mouthing some of these things, was washed out with soap to teach it a lesson about what to mouth and what not to mouth. The mouth wondered why something so clean as soap had to taste so dirty. The mouth would have an aversion to Lava brand soap bars that would last a lifetime. The mouth was 6 years old, precisely the age of the small person it was attached to, though it had been recognizably a mouth for somewhat longer than that. The mouth wished it could be washed out with candy, or with ice cream, or with bubble gum. The mouth formed questions it rolled up into bite-sized pieces: Where does God live? How did the world get 7 billion people? Are mussels called mussels because they have big muscles? are all things the mouth wanted to know. The mouth wondered if there were mouths in space, secret mouths deep in the universe, and what comes into and out of these mouths. The mouth wondered what was the first mouth ever, was it the mouth of the distant ball of gas that gave birth to the Sun in our Galaxy and other sunlike stars in other galaxies? Was it the mouth of God? And if no one ever had a mouth before God how would God even know what to do with a mouth, who could God even ask because She’d have to know how to move Her mouth to move Her mouth? Our own mouths lacked the ability to form satisfactory answers to the mouth’s questions. The mouth was sometimes admonished for talking too much out of turn in school. The mouth was placed in time out. The mouth was good at apologizing, and redeemed itself. The mouth, a fast learner, would someday talk itself into dates and jobs, and bargains on cars. The mouth would comfort the sad at funerals, speak up against the cruel. The mouth would go through an experimental lipstick phase. The world would be better off for the mouth having mouthed off. But for now the mouth was still exploring the limits of being a mouth. We never quite knew what it would say or do, and that was part of the primordial delight that would leave us gaping at the mouth, our own jaws stretched wider than they’d imagined themselves capable of, ready to inhale the unspoken world, poised to take in all that we could swallow.
Matt Leibel’s short fiction has been published in Electric Literature, Portland Review, Carolina Quarterly, DIAGRAM and X-R-A-Y, and is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2020.
