Best British Short Stories 2017 by Nicholas Royle

Author:Nicholas Royle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salt Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-06-13T10:48:41+00:00

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IRENOSEN OKOJIE

The last monk told the tongue that holding a naked sheep’s head underwater would undo it all. Some time before that, prior to the madness beginning, old Barking Abbey loomed in the chasm, grey, weather worn, remote. Inside the Abbey, a tongue sat in the golden snuff box on an empty long dining table: pink, scarred and curled into a ruffled, silken square of night. The previous week, the tongue had been used as a bookmark in a marked, leather-bound King James Bible, page 45 where the silhouette of a girl had been cut out, loaded with words like high, hog, clitoris, iodine, cake, its moist tip glistening in temporary confinement. The week before that, the tongue had been left in the fountain at the back of the Abbey, between winking coins. There, it pressed its tip to a stray ripple, cold and malleable, shaping it into a weight, pulling it down, under, up again. Several weeks back, it had been in a hallway window, leaning into Mary’s hands, whose fingertips tasted of a charred, foreign footprint from the grass. Her fingertips had sensed a change in the air before the monks came, when the corridors were quiet, expectant. Molecules had shifted in preparation for a delivery. The monks arrived through a hole in time on a cold, misty morning, transported via a warp in space that mangled the frequencies of past and present. They arrived curling hands that did not belong to them. Unaware that this would have consequences none foresaw, except a tongue bending in the background, unaware of the repercussions of time travel.

Each time the tongue was moved, it lost a sentence. The monks missed this in their ritual of silence. They had done for weeks, walking around rooms with arms behind their backs, bodies shrouded in heavy brown robes, shaven, sunken heads soft to the touch. They trod this new ground carrying yolks in their mouths, hardening as morning became noon, noon became evening, and evening became night.

One morning, the monks found a miller’s wife gutted on the stone wall enclosing the allotment, a white felt cap shoved into her mouth, her husband’s initials embroidered in blue at the top right corner of her bloody apron: V.O. They threw salt on her skin. The tongue tasted the sharpness, and that night, Dom Vitelli made the noise of a kettle boiling in his sleep. He began to tremble covered in a cold sweat. He fell to the floor, stuck.

The next morning, the monks rose to discover the empty well near the stone outbuilding surrounded by plump, purple jabuticaba fruit, tender and bruised, the colour dwindling in areas as though a god was sucking it through a crack in the sky. Lonely figures in their heavy brown robes, the monks held their hands out as they circled the abbey. They heard the sounds of buses on the high street, car doors slammed shut, trains grinding to a halt. They caught items that fell through noise, things they

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