This Wicked Tongue by Elise Levine

Author:Elise Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2019-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

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Inside the Queen’s Little Queen.

Butter.

A toy syringe.

Three Cheerios.

Clot of red thread from the Dowager’s tin sewing kit.

A darning needle—the Queen’s Little Queen bites back a gasp—blackened under a votive flame’s sizzle then withdrawn at the last second.

Wider, the Queen commands, holding each object high and pronouncing on it before undertaking the insertion. The Queen’s Little Queen’s thighs quake—that’s our girl, big baby at fifteen, la petite ami. Stocked and restocked this past hour.

A yellow button for the Queen’s beloved granny in hospice since last week.

Blue for errant dadster ensconced this past month in a downtown love pad with his hottie-in-waiting. For her a tube of orange-flavoured Bonne Bell lip gloss.

A bed sheet canopies the ceiling over the rarely used basement cocktail bar. Cut-out camels and albino elephants from National G, affixed to the sheet with safety pins, sway and flicker in the candlelight. There’s a Versailles ripped from a history textbook. Paper rubies from who knows. A Beautiful Homes photo of a glossy armoire carved with toucans and vines and monkeys chattering of rumoured tiny and tinier ivory-inlaid drawers. The Queen’s Little Queen, delirium ravaged, imagines cubby upon cubby stuffed with treasure. In one drawer, a miniature Queen’s Little Queen—our girl, all cunt.

Break time. The Queens ascend the basement stairs to swig grape sodas in the dinky kitchen. Everything is dated avocado, very barf but the Dowager’s money doesn’t grow on trees. She’s out wrapping raw steaks and chicken legs at the A&P so she can return long past dark bearing Hamburger Helper, shredded pink flesh, pineapple juice in a can. A carton of chocolate milk to wheedle into the Little One who usually refuses sustenance heartier than crackers and Cagney & Lacey reruns during evening visits. Yesterday’s morsel of dead ant from her own so-called home’s driveway doesn’t count. Nor do the thimblefuls of Liquid Plumber she’s begun to imagine.

The Little Friend, her teachers have long called her. The Goer-Alonger, her own mother carps. Mother Rat, is how the girl thinks of the woman. Mother-Hunk of Spoilt Ham.

But here and now our girl is the Queen’s Little Queen, sloshing the soda in her can. Make it last, she prays. But the Queen—desperate to avenge the recent disintegration of her realm, an apple blush spreading on her furious cheeks—crushes her empty bare handed and flips it into the sink. She claps twice. Tu! Vite!

Hurts more this time. The Queen’s Little Queen’s tender tissues burn.

Inside her, knuckles like newts from a spell, a headful of smoke.

And silent prayer—Tale of No Time to Speak. Word buzz, a whole ball of wax.

She shortcuts home across her school’s football field, a pasture of bright heavens above. Je suis, she reminds herself. Tu es. French test tomorrow. Anything to take her mind off.

Like Tale of Once Upon a Time—news from the world at large, which she has learned at school—Some Immortal Sparks Fell. A plane burst over a place called Lockerbie. Or a plane plunged into the Sea of Japan, or more recently the Indian Ocean.

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