The God of Tongues by Jennifer Wortman

One day, Ronny Mahoney, walking to school with his buddy Will Naylor, whirled around and stuck out his tongue at me. At seven, I was old enough to understand the gesture’s nuances: it could be playful or a big fuck you.

Back then, I was very happy but didn’t know it and also very sad but didn’t know it. Mostly I walked around in this state of unknowing, trying to figure out the world. It had something to do with school, a hollowness I’d carried with me since kindergarten where my parents’ love used to be. They hadn’t withdrawn their love—it hugged the hollowness and filled me elsewhere. But I now knew the world was bigger than their affection, and that bigness contained a loveless maw.

My dad used to stick out his tongue and wag his fingers at me, his thumbs jammed below his ears so his hands looked like misplaced antlers. I’d laugh and stick out my tongue back. But Ronny Mahoney’s tongue-sticking had a meanness in it. He was three years older than me and therefore a giant; I’d always passed his notice. Now everything in his face said he wanted to hurt me, and that want to hurt was the hurt; it cracked open my chest.

After that first time, even when I dragged far behind, Ronny Mahoney would find a way to launch his tongue at me. He’d hide behind a tree or jump out from behind a car or just turn around and backtrack. I didn’t tell my parents because I feared they’d confront him and he’d be mean to them too; the thought hurt even more than his meanness to me.

The next year we moved across town, and I switched to another school. I got on with my life, but I also spent the rest of it, on some level, waiting for faces to split open and shoot at me a pink slimy thing. While I waited, that hollowness inside me grew.

Over thirty years later, my dad newly dead, I was out in my hometown drinking even though I didn’t drink anymore. But that drinking didn’t count because my dad was dead and now nothing counted or would ever count again. After a countless number of drinks, I looked at the sad sack on the stool next to me, sagged over his beer. Even slumped and older and bearded and sideways, he rang the alarm of his existence.

The little girl inside me wanted to run away. But the big girl inside me shook her head  and knocked back the rest of her drink.

“You’re Ronny Mahoney,” I said.

He wasn’t a skinny boy, but now skinny arms poked out of his black t-shirt. He turned.

“I’ll be,” Ronny Mahoney said. “You’re that girl.”

“I have a name,” I said. But I didn’t say it.

Ronny Mahoney stuck his tongue out at me, but in a fun way, like my dad. So I didn’t cry, I stuck my tongue out right back, but that also made me want to cry, so I smiled flirtatiously.

Ronny ticked his head at the rear of the room and walked off. I’d seen this move before from men in bars. I knew exactly what I shouldn’t do in these circumstances, and I also knew I would do it. I followed him out the door to the alley. Then I was up against cold brick, Ronny’s tongue on and around and in my tongue.

Tongue, tongue, tongue. I pulled away.

“But why,” I asked, “were you so mean to me?

Even in the low light of the alley, I saw his brows knit in confusion.“I was just a kid.”

“So was I.”

“I don’t know, man,” he said. “You had those piggytails. And those crazy big eyes you still got. But I don’t remember why.”

“If you remember me, you remember why.”

“I mean, it probably felt good,” he said. “Then bad. Even back then, I liked to go back and forth. You know how they say people are mean to other people to make themselves feel good? I did it to feel good so I could feel bad.”

“No!” I said. “It just made you feel good. I could tell. It was scary how good it made you feel.”

“You’re on to me, then. Do what you will.” He thrust his arms sideways and dropped his head, fake crucified. I let him stand that way for a while, looking dumb.

“What do you want from me?” he finally said. “I was a little brat, okay? Then I was a big brat. And now I’m a big nobody.”

That hurt more than anything else he’d said. He couldn’t be a nobody. Ronny Mahoney was the god of tongues. When I was a kid, he showed himself to me. If he was a nobody, then nobody was anybody. Even my dad. Who I should have told about Ronny Mahoney way back when. Who I should have told many things, my whole fucked-up life, so he could know me and still love me. Now he would never.

I turned to leave.

Ronny Mahoney grabbed my arm. I whirled around. In his eyes, again, after all those years: that joyful mean glint.

I let his tongue demolish me.

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JENNIFER WORTMAN — Jennifer is the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. Her work appears in TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere, and has been cited as distinguished in Best American Short Stories. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell, she lives with her family in Colorado, where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and serves as associate fiction editor for Colorado Review. Find more at jenniferwortman.com.

Art by MARIE MAGNETIC — Marie (b. 1989, Jackson, Michigan) is a Chicago-based visual artist using color, form, and surreal images to make sense of humanity through her identity as queer, neurodivergent, Jewish, and Indigenous. Marie graduated from Central Michigan University in 2017, studying Psychology. She is a Foundation House, Haven Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts grant recipient. Additionally, her work has been published in LAMINATOR ZINE, Pinky Thinker Press, and The Globe Review.