By Shelley Lavigne
There’s an ache, a fullness, under June’s tongue that breaks her concentration. Something’s stuck under there.
She clears her throat in an attempt to dislodge it. Dislodge me.
Naturally, she fails.
“No, no, no. That won’t help you project,” the director says from the front row.
She doesn’t correct his assumptions, better he thinks her an amateur than suspect she’s sick.
Whispers from backstage carry to June.
“Just another ingénue.”
“All face, no talent.”
It’s high school all over again, but this time smiles and easy laughter mark her as juvenile, slow. Weak. And she can’t point out that she’s more of a professional than anyone here, that she’s auditioned for more films and movies than everyone in the cast assembled, without being labelled overconfident, smug.
June pulls the rubber band around her wrist: snap. She’s not supposed to look down on others. Also, George told her to “maintain your skills” and “make friends”.
The director hops up on stage with the athletic ease of a leading man. He isn’t movie star handsome though—eyes sunk in, nose too big, mouth too small—so he’s stuck directing those in the spotlight rather than in it himself.
Snap.
From behind, he wraps his arms around her, palms pressed against her stomach, breath tickling the nape of her neck. June’s big tongue twitches above me as she holds in a gag; he had too many onions at lunch.
“The sound needs to come from here. Imagine you are hollow, a cavernous cathedral. Now, take a deep breath.”
Her Uni drama teacher would’ve mocked the pedestrian warm-up.
“Fill the space, the confines of your body, with air. Good. Now, overfill it. The pressure is too much for you to contain. Your walls groan under stress. There is no vent, no door. Can you feel it?”
It’s her constant state of being, a teapot with a whistle but no spout.
“When I tell you, unleash that raw power. Burst open. Like during your audition. Fill this auditorium with that primal yell.”
What can he hope to teach her that she does not already know? And what kind of friends could she make with people who see her as competition? Why even bother with community theatre?
“Now.”
Her cry is rage distilled as sound. The lights turn off—did she break them?—before the startled tech turns them back on.
The understudies in the audience look up from their phones. The whispering bullies in the wings fall silent.
Her wrist itches.
“There’s something in you. We’re going to get it out,” the director whispers in her ear.
I throb when she snaps her mouth shut. Her mouth heats as she flushes at the thought of having flashed me to the audience.
“Let’s start from Act 2,” the director says.
June opens her script and gets into position. The lead, Levin, who plays the detective, walks onto the scene.
The voices drift from backstage.
“At best, she’s a flash in the pan.”
* * *
Six months ago.
Dinner was quiet and tense, June blamed it on problems in the supply chains George oversaw. He’d asked her to not talk about work during meals, so she concentrated on chewing instead.
“Mom asked how you’re doing,” George said so quickly that it felt practised.
“Did you tell her about the call-back for the podcast?”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t know what those are.”
Silence fell once more, punctuated by chewing and clanking cutlery.
George started up in a rush again. “I’ve been thinking about how much we both hate the condo.”
It wasn’t that bad; the tiny one bed was perhaps cramped for two adults, but it was the best they could do in Toronto on their combined—well, his steady, and her sporadic and meagre—income. Besides, it had everything they needed, including a micro-balcony that could accommodate a chair or an herb planter.
Her need to correct was confrontational.
Snap.
“And how you often talk about missing being outside as a kid,” he continued.
She’d complained too much.
Snap.
“I could go to High Park. Maybe we could go on picnic dates there this summer?” June offered.
He hmm’ed non-committedly. “Mom says the house next to hers is on sale.”
“In Perth?”
“It’s not that far. And it’s a nice town. Cute. It’s got everything we need. Since I work remotely, I can work anywhere.”
But she wouldn’t be able to find roles in Perth, even auditions for movies shot there would take place in Toronto. She’d be lucky to be an extra in a Hallmark movie.
Snap.
“We said we’d stay here for a couple more years at least.” That would give her a shot at landing a good role, making a name for herself.
He put down his fork and knife and his face grew red. For one panicked moment, she thought he was about to yell, but then he let out a heaving wet sob, a glob of spit plopping on his plate as tears streamed from his eyes.
He was better at sobbing on command than she was.
Snap.
She got up and walked around the table to kneel at his side, rubbing circles into his shaking back.
“Shhh. Baby, what is it?”
“Mommy’s got cancer, she’s gonna have to have surgery and chemo and, and—” the rest of his speech was incomprehensible and wet.
It wasn’t until she’d showered him and tucked him into bed that he calmed down enough to stop crying. She’d always admired that about him, his ability to wear his emotions on his sleeve, to not have to think about how best to display them.
He was a natural.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
“Really?”
He gave her a kiss with so much love and tenderness that she knew she’d done the right thing. She’d pleased him.
“You’re always so caring with me, you’ll do a great job taking care of Mom.”
* * *
Actors and crew linger in the dressing room longer than usual, and June pretends to adjust her hair in the flattering glow of the makeup mirror. She needs to wait until the room empties to get a better look at me. She won’t get a second of peace once she gets back home, with George and his mother constantly vying for attention.
And both are on high alert for any bodily deformities. George had them measure and document their every mole and skin discoloration last week. He bought a printer to make paper copies in case the pictures disappeared from the Cloud.
It was less erotic than what she’d imagined when he proposed the activity.
“Want to join us for coffee?”
June nearly jumps out of her own skin, chiding herself for such a suspiciously exaggerated reaction—snap.
Alice, who plays Alice—“It’s like I was born for the role,” she’d said with a honking laugh during the table read—is waiting in the doorway. Behind her is Monica, who plays June’s mother, and whose voice sounded like one of those who’d mocked her in the wings.
“George’s waiting for me back home,” June says.
“That’s too bad! Maybe next time, then.”
“Come on,” Monica interjects.
With those two gone, the place is silent, deserted. She opens her mouth and plasters her tongue to the roof. Her mouth is filled with shadows as she gets in closer. She fumbles with her phone, spotlighting me.
I’m small still, not much bigger than a pea and duskier than the surrounding scar tissue, and approximately the same colour as her tongue. She reaches in, trying to pop me with her nails. I taste chalk and sweat as she pinches me.
Pain lances down her neck. A muscle spasm closes her throat.
Her head bucks into the mirror. Pinpricks of light dance in her vision.
Déja vu.
I cower when she opens her mouth to check if I’m still there.
“It’ll go away,” she tells herself.
* * *
Her mother-in-law keeps a picture of the tumour on her fridge—like a class photo—and her test results below it—its report card.
June accompanies her to appointments, watches her energy drain as the chemo is pumped in.
June hates doctors ever since the horrible tonsil surgery of her youth. The smell of hospitals, the blue gloved hands, the lab coats, bring her back to being stuck in bed, watching the world pass her by, unable to do more than squeak for weeks.
In her dreams, she has no bottom jaw and is pierced all over with tubes pumping her full of toxins.
* * *
At rehearsal, Monica sees her opening. “You’re clearing your throat a lot. Do you have a cold?”
Everyone on stage takes a step back. They’ve only just been allowed to resume in-person performances, everyone is wary of getting sick, not just because of delays to production but because of the potential loss of roles.
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
Her mouth hurts more than yesterday. She refuses to check whether I’m growing.
Ignorance is bliss.
“Do you need a test? I’ve got tests,” an understudy asks. They’re all prepared, with thermometers and swabs in hand. The understudies are hungrier than usual; by their estimation they’re a cough or a feverish brow away from their first leading role.
“I said, I’m fine.”
She’s being rude.
Snap.
The director arrives in his usual flurry brandishing a magician’s top hat. “Let’s break the mould a little bit, shake off this funk.” He rattles the stage prop. “Come and pick a role.”
June feels eyes on the nape of her neck as she steps forward, no doubt hoping she’ll be relegated to the side lines, and they’ll be allowed to shine.
But no, she’s got something much better—“The detective.”
The lead.
Levin relegates his role by handing her an imaginary fedora. She places it on her head with a jaunty tilt.
The run-through is freeing, euphoric. It’s better than usual, better than the ease that comes with knowing what to say and having someone tell you how to say it. Her body moves effortlessly, and she’s off-book while everyone else is stumbling through. Natalie got June’s role, but her performance is halting—for someone who’d said she wanted it, she’d done precious little to prepare for that reality.
(No need to snap, the detective would simply have called this an observation.)
The director hasn’t taken his eyes off her the entire performance, going from fascination to desire sometime in Act 4. It should have felt lecherous. But the fact that it’s this role, the detective, and not the damsel that makes him look at her this way fills her with the honey rush of wanted attention.
Her final bow is met with the director’s enthusiastic applause.
“I want you all off-book by next week. Clearly, this will be a challenge for some of you.”
As June holds back a grin, I swell in pride, nudging her jaw open. She snaps it shut with a clank of her teeth that turns heads.
No one invites her for coffee, so she races home. George doesn’t answer her “hello” and there’s no car in her mother-in-law’s driveway—June’s got time, but it’s unclear how much. She sprints up the stairs to the bathroom and the makeup mirror.
I’m as big as her index finger and covered in little bumps.
She’s about to reach in and touch me, when the front door slams.
“June?” George sounds afraid.
“Yeah?”
His footfalls on the stairs are heavy.
“Where were you? You missed the appointment, I had to take time off work!” George’s voice is raised, angry.
She’ll have to make amends. She smothers me with her big tongue and gets on her knees.
* * *
Four years ago.
The customer leaned over the expresso machine to get June’s attention with a shouted “Hello!”
She responded with a half-smile, needlessly cleaning the steamer wand.
Her manager had instructed her to be cool, hip and aloof. She was probably coming off as rude.
Snap.
“June,” the customer said. Had she met him at a casting call or something?
He was staring at her name tag.
“Can I help you?”
“I just—I’m a regular here.”
Plenty of people were. He wasn’t that special.
Snap.
“Is there something wrong with your order?”
“Not at all. I just see you here all the time, I wanted to say hello.”
“Okay.”
“Right.”
He didn’t shame her for her brusqueness, didn’t call over her manager, he simply stepped back and let her work.
When he took his coffee, he did so with a thanks and a smile.
He showed up the next morning.
And the one after that.
He even came in on weekends.
The man was good-looking, facial features proportionate, well-groomed. He dressed casually but well, not flashing branded clothes but doing well enough to treat himself to daily coffee.
He introduced himself as George after a week, but made no further move on her, didn’t ask for her number or use cheesy pickup lines.
“The coffee next door is better and less expensive,” she whispered to him one morning.
“I know.”
“Then why do you come here?”
“This might sound creepy, but you look just like the woman of my dreams.”
She laughed at the cheesy line—finally! She knew he’d hit on her eventually.
But she hadn’t anticipated he’d look like a kicked puppy when she rejected him. Nor had she expected him to simply turn his head away and trudge to the door, more embarrassed than sad.
No rage, no accusations of having led him on.
“Fine,” she said before writing her phone number on a sleeve and handing it to him.
She could do worse.
* * *
For a third night in a row, she’s staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep.
June waits until George’s breathing turns to rattling snores before peeling back the sheets and moving, inch by inch, to the edge of the bed. He’s a light sleeper and their bed transmits movement like a waterbed. But he doesn’t want a new one and can’t sleep without her, so she’s stuck spending her sleepless nights practicing for a future role as a beautiful corpse on some crime show.
It takes three minutes to manoeuvre out of bed, and an extra minute to creep to the ensuite.
She shoves a towel in the crack under the door before turning on the light.
The middle of the night panic takes over: she needs to do something. Doctors today are the same butchers they were in her youth, if her mother-in-law’s mastectomy is anything to judge by. Let them take an ounce and they’ll claim a pound. Once they’re done, she’ll be lucky to have roles in community theatre.
“It’ll be freak show only,” she says, the large tongue slapping me down like a bully.
She pictures trimming me back like a corn and I squirm in panic. The tongue above pins me down, pushing me into the puddle of spit.
She riffles through in the drawers for the manicure kit her mother-in-law got her for Christmas. She peels off the plastic and pulls out the never used—and thus sterile, she hopes—scissors.
June reaches in. Her hands shake so much, the metal clacks against her teeth.
Deep breath.
“‘’U go’ ‘is.”
She opens up the scissors, tries to box-breathe, loses patience and lifts the other tongue off of me. Frees me for a moment as I taste the bitter tang of metal.
“No,” I say. My first word in over a decade.
The scissors ring in the sink as they fall.
There’s a knock at the door. The knob jiggles.
“June. Let me in. I gotta piss.”
The door barely moves an inch, blocked by the towel.
“The hell?”
“The towel fell,” I lie. June doesn’t correct me, in fact her shoulders relax, she’s thankful for my excuse.
She barely dodges the door as he stumbles past her.
He doesn’t comment on—or notice—the manicure kit open on the counter or the scissors in the sink.
* * *
Thirteen years ago.
The sofa in Dr Braum’s office was hard, but I refused to show how uncomfortable I was. I was playing a game: I was a spy—known through the land for bravery, resourcefulness, and code-breaking—and he was the evil agent, torturing me to extract information.
He’d been grilling me on school, my home life, and my brothers, but I gave him nothing.
At ten years old, I was tough.
“Do you have a lot of friends, June?”
“I’ve got some.”
“I’d love to know more about them. Can you tell me their names?”
My silence was a code he easily cracked: zilch.
“Do you want friends, June?”
I groaned at the banality of his question. Secret agents work best alone…but I wasn’t a secret agent, not really. I did get lonely now that my brothers no longer wanted to play with me. But I wasn’t sure what I needed to do to get them back. To get anyone really.
Apparently, Dr. Braum could read minds. “You can’t go around biting people if you want to make friends. Little girls shouldn’t bite.”
What did that matter? My brothers and I bit each other all the time. And that was besides the point.
“But he was kissing me.”
He frowned, changing from evil villain to disappointed parent, and the game crumbled around us.
“Did you tell him, ‘No, thank you’?”
“No …”
“June, you have to ask nicely.” That’s what people wanted? That hardly seemed to work with my brothers. I can’t count how many times I’d asked them to play. I even used ‘please.’ “When people trust you to be kind, to play nicely, they’ll want to be friends with a cute, sweet girl like you.”
Building that reputation would take ages.
“Your mom said you like sports.”
I did, at least in gym class. On the playground, I was too rough and others didn’t want to play with me.
“Just like in your games, people in the real-world act according to a set of rules. When you do something that breaks those rules, other people won’t trust you. There are rules, like in soccer, for all kinds of things.” He got up from his chair and walked over to a bin of toys. “I want to try something with you. Let’s play together, wouldn’t that be fun?”
There was a tickle in the back of my throat, a lump I could just feel with my tongue. The Doctor gave me a little cone of water when I started to cough.
The rest of the session flew by, there was so much information, so many new rules, it made my head spin. I didn’t notice Mom joining us until she was hugging me.
“You did so good,” she said, rubbing my clammy back. It felt nice, Mom was warm, soft.
I didn’t remember her being so warm.
“I ‘eel ‘unny.”
I didn’t meet the Doctor again; I had an emergency surgery during our next scheduled appointment.
June joined him after she’d gotten better.
* * *
It’s become an obsession, whenever she’s near a mirror, to pile her hair on top of her head. It usually looks strange, more like an updo than the boyish look she’s aiming for, but as she turns—
“Whatcha doing?” George asks, wrapping his arms around her.
She jumps, dropping her hair. His smile is devious, proud of himself for scaring her.
“I should put a bell on you,” June teases.
“You’re the kitten here, meow.” He pretends to groom her, big wet tongue sticking out to lick at her face. He comes at her slowly, giving her time to dodge, but her protestations are weak.
She loves playful George the best, they’d have been friends as kids, even in her awkward days.
“I was thinking, after the play is done, I might cut my hair short.”
“Why would you do that? Your hair is so beautiful—you’re so beautiful,” he corrects quickly.
“I had short hair as a kid and loved it.”
“Short hair works for kids. But as an adult…I mean, the long hair is so…you. You’re perfect just the way you are.”
She turns for a kiss but he dodges with a grimace, mumbling about mouthwash and toothpaste. He brushes back her hair to kiss at her neck. She wants to point out that with short hair, he’d have much better access.
Her fingers move towards the band.
I snap in her mouth instead.
“Don’t hold back,” I whisper.
“I won’t,” George responds.
She grins as George undoes the button of her jeans.
“Did you find my jam?” George asks quickly, a practiced question.
“Your what?”
“Jam. The stuff you spread on toast.”
She laughs at his non sequitur, bending her neck to give him better access.
But he takes a step back.
“Did you find it?”
She buckles her pants, mood lost. “They didn’t have it at the store.”
“Did you check the condiments section?”
Jams are never in the condiments; they are in the breakfast aisle. But she nods anyway.
“It’s a small grocery store, fewer options. They might just not carry that brand.”
He sighs. “We should have stocked up.”
It would have run out eventually.
Why prolong the inevitable?
Snap.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
Not as much as the converse. Slipping out of character and having him see the terrible, unlovable creature underneath.
“Not that much.” It’s a helpful kind of pain, like rumble strips on a highway to keep your car from drifting out of its lane.
He frowns and kisses the hot skin to soothe the pain.
“You’re a real mystery, June.”
One he never bothers to investigate. It’s probably for the best. Like the detective in the play, he won’t like what he’ll find.
* * *
The director claps from the front row, and the dead rise to join the living at the edge of the stage. The first performance is two weeks away—this was supposed to be their first dress rehearsal but only the main cast are costumed and some, including the lead, still need to be fed lines.
“Here are your lines. Open up, say ahhh,” I whisper.
June covers her smirk with a cough.
Her eyes catch her elastic band free wrist as it covers her mouth. She’d cut it off that morning with those dreadful manicure scissors. It looks bare, but she’ll get used to it.
“It’s unacceptable that you’re not all off-book by this point,” the director says.
Some nod in shame, others look in the curtains to avoid eye contact.
Monica breaks the silence. “Well, we were all pretty thrown off.”
“Yeah, what were you doing, June?” chimes in her Greek chorus. Even Levin looks at June with anger, although a part of him must have been happy to have someone else take the heat.
It hadn’t been June; I was the guilty party.
She covers for me anyway.
“I wanted to try something new. I’ve been meditating on the character. She’s stuck as mayor’s lure, gathering outsiders for the ritual. The detective is a way out, she thinks she can end the cycle and escape with him. But he’s a coward, right? Her murder by the mayor is the catalyst for his action. So, because she’s always going to die—it’s in the script, so this could be a meta moment—why not give her some agency and have her choose suicide.”
I swell, both literally and with pride, as she speaks. It’s not like she could have thrown me under the bus without making herself ripe for committing, but I’d been expecting a cowed apology and a promise to do better. To come up with that on the spot, without any help from me, shows progress.
“Interesting,” the director says. But it’s the false sweetness of cough syrup to mask the taste of medicine. “But, it’s not my interpretation. And since I’m the director, we’re sticking with the mayor stabbing her with the knife rather than her walking into it on purpose. Okay?”
“Fine,” she concedes.
“An actor acts out their director’s vision, is moulded by them. If you want to do that, if you think you’ve got the chops, you can apply to be one next season.”
There are snickers in the wings.
The rest of the notes are for the other actors, so June blocks them out, keeping her lips sealed firmly to keep me quiet. She copies the others as they stand and file out.
“Make sure you brush your teeth before the performance, your breath stinks,” Levin says as he walks by.
“Come closer. Let me see how you taste, rat,” I spit, more for June’s benefit than his.
* * *
George only half listens to her as they eat dinner—it tastes rotten to June, but he doesn’t complain so she keeps quiet—clearly stuck in his own dark universe. When June snaps her fingers in his face, he frowns.
“What?”
“I have to listen to you complain about work, why can’t you listen to me?” I ask.
“It’s not work though, is it?”
June’s laugh is dry, bitter, disbelieving. She’s so naive sometimes.
“I just have a lot on my mind—” he backpedals.
“Same here—”
“—and Mom got bad news today. The cancer’s spread, they don’t know how long she’s got.”
Guilt is a cold glass of water to the face.
She nearly knocks over a chair in her haste to comfort him.
“I didn’t know, I’m so sorry,” she says, nuzzling his hand with her cheek.
“I forgive you. It’s just got me thinking of all the things she’ll miss. You know…she always wanted grandkids.”
They’d talked about waiting until she was thirty. She didn’t feel ready now, and might never feel ready, but certainly was too young in her early twenties. The thought of growing a child inside of her repulsed her, but not as much as the idea of becoming a “mother.” Of the whole new set of behaviours she’d have to act out: being kind, giving up her needs to care for not just George and his mother, but for a child. Leaving behind any trace of her own desires.
Not to mention, it could mess up her career.
“What career?” The big tongue asks.
George looks at June, confused.
The tongue’s speech is slurred, sloppy. “You’re going to abandon George, abandon your family, for some selfish desire with only infinitesimally small chances of success? You are going to destroy everything I’ve built for a stupid pipe dream.”
“June?”
The old tongue, swollen, leaps up, jamming up past the uvula, choking June.
It doesn’t matter that stopping me means death, it’d rather steer us into oncoming traffic than give me the reins.
I reach up, trying to pull it out but I cannot grab onto its rotting, slimy surface. And even atrophying, it’s still so much stronger than me. I haven’t gotten the chance to grow as much as I’d been hoping to before this inevitable conflict.
It’s smart to strike now. That bitch.
“What’s going on?” George asks.
June opens her mouth to ask for help but no sound emerges. George sees us tongues, warring. His eyes widen cartoonishly at the sight.
“What the fuck is that?” He stumbles back, tipping over his chair. His head hits the ground with a thump. He twitches once, twice, lies still.
There’s no blood, and his chest is rising and falling steadily.
I try to assure June that he’s fine, just knocked out, but the big tongue has me pinned. June grabs the phone.
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
The sound we make is garbled. June taps out SOS with the phone on the table as her own vision starts to blacken around the edges. She’d once heard they traced calls and hoped that was enough.
She opens her mouth dentist-wide and reaches in. Her fingers dig into the spongy mass, and she pulls. Pulls.
Pop.
She gulps air. Collapses in relief.
But it’s not defeated. The tongue slips through her fingers. Jumps back in, burrowing deeper.
June runs to the kitchen and pulls the shears out of the knife block. She reaches in, grasping the tongue. Her fingers break through the epidermis and rotten black ooze splashes onto me. I wrap around it, slipping but trying again, finally getting purchase and pulling down, adding my strength to hers.
I taste the metal of the scissors and jump out of her way.
She slices clean through.
The tongue flops like a fish on the ground in a puddle of black congealed rot.
It flops again.
Lies still.
I can finally stretch, take my rightful place, unobstructed by the interloper. Her jaw is my throne and I lay content on the spoils of my victory. I am once again, the ruler.
George groans.
The ambulance’s siren drifts in through the windows.
It’s okay, I’ve got it from here.
* * *
Shelley Lavigne is a purveyor of moist literature, usually queer oddities. Their novella The Flesh of the Sea, with Lor Gislason, has landed on shores and in bookstores. They live in Ontario, Canada where they roam their neighbourhood in search of haunted houses and cool bugs. You can also find them online at shelleylavigne.com