The Last Time I Saw You by Rebecca Brown

Author:Rebecca Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’m sorry I didn’t explain to you why I left. I’m sorry I left the way I did but I was afraid and that is the only smart thing that I have ever been.

A Ventriloquist

I live with a ventriloquist.

You think you hear me talking but it is not me. My lips and throat and tongue make noise but you don’t hear me. No one does. It isn’t me, it’s who I live with. I am but her voice, her vessel. Less.

I once thought it was clever, like a trick that I enjoyed. I liked to laugh at others because they didn’t know. (I did.) But now I’m like the girl who cried wolf, cried dog, cried so much and so many times, I could not be believed. I don’t cry wolf, I don’t cry tears. I open my mouth and someone else does all of whatever is done.

She is behind me, underneath. I’m on her lap and hollow and her hand is up my neck, that hole. She’s got her hand—it’s firm and stiff—around the wooden end of my wooden tongue. It’s painted black with that special spiffy waterproof paint that makes everything look shiny and wet. She’s got her fist around that stump and she is tugging it, she’s wagging it and saying things that I would never say.

No one can see her, only me, and only sometimes me. Then only sometimes, rarely, when I can twist my head and see her from the corner of my eye. My eye is a marble, milky edged, with pretty, curly lashes that are not mine. Sometimes my eye folds into me and all I see is dark.

I feel her breath on the back of my neck, her mouth against my hair. I think it’s from a human head, but remade for a doll’s. It’s fine and thin and fly-away. She likes it. She presses her face against it and says hideous, terrible things. She snickers when she says them, Hold me close.

It is not just she’s a ventriloquist.

I hate to have to say this for I know to even suggest such a comparison is disrespectful, a sacrilege, against the grain, the very nut, but it’s the only thing that I can think of it’s like: like one of those Tibetan monks, the holy, wise, old men who can sing more than one note at a time. It’s something they do with their vocal chords, they split apart, can make more than one sound at once. Each one alone can sing a chord. So she, though old but hardly holy—

Though maybe I’ve got that wrong, too. Maybe in fact all of it. Maybe she is the voice of God, of Him on high, of Her inside, of Everything I long for. Want. Maybe the terrible way she is is it.

Perhaps she is more like them than I thought. Both old and holy, speaking, singing words, two things at once, both hideous and glorious, the one I look as if I say, the one said just to only me alone.

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