TONGUE TWISTERS — VICTORIA BUITRON
/In order to join, people have to morph their tongues. Most pick the easiest: a piercing. No beatings or dares, just paying for pain. They live with Jiggly Puff, a glow-in-the-dark moon, or even a tiny Pepsi Crystal can piercing on their taste flesh. Maybe, eventually, a keloid. Simon gets a tattoo of his initials in the middle of his tongue: SOS. I ask him if he ever felt the peeling of his old skin, his mouth once a chrysalis. Sydney cheats because her tongue is too special, and she can’t risk losing the ability to do her cherry-stem knot trick. “Fine,” Kai says, “Do fifty knots in five minutes and you can join.” And she does. Kai jokes that if you want to leave, then you also leave a piece of your tongue in a jar like giardiniera carrots.
Sebas is the riskiest one of all, and he gets a forked tongue like a rattlesnake. After the middle scar heals, he alternates moving each side up and down like a true serpent, scaring the kids on his street into nightmares. He says the pain is worth it to see people’s eye shock. At first, I don’t know if risking my tongue is worth joining the group, since they mostly sit around at the Paper Cut Bar and play darts, but when Manny drives without a license and lands in jail, they all show up and pool money together to bail him out.
On the day of my initiation, I say: “Something happened in the last few days, and I can no longer taste.” At Pete’s Beer and Wings there’s a challenge to eat a dozen Afterlife Wings. If you down all of them in less than two minutes, Pete doesn’t charge you. Instead, you get $50 on the house. Only two people have done it—one passed out for a few minutes, spoke to his dead father who told him to get a colonoscopy. Turns out those death wings saved his life.
I start and the gang begins to chant, “Tita’s tongue! Tita’s tongue!” I feel the texture of meat and the gunk but nothing more, transcending logic. I eat, pull the meat off the skin and hold back tears that are more automatic than pain prone, and I’m so glad I wore my good mascara today. My throat and neck feel warm, then hot—a cut on my index finger stings—and while my stomach doesn’t taste, it screams out in gurgles. The chants make sure no one hears, and hopefully the heat doesn’t bleed a hole through my esophagus. Before I swallow the last piece, my body is warm as if I’ve eaten a scorpion. I’m up in the air, on shoulders, strangers whistling, human hooting muting the music, their smiles as if I’ve just turned tap water into amber beer for their tongues to savor and maybe tomorrow my senses will return and I’ll finally learn what fire tastes like.
Victoria Buitron is an award-winning writer who hails from Ecuador and resides in Connecticut. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, the 2021 Connecticut Literary Anthology, The Acentos Review, and other literary magazines. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, is the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner.
