James Morena

Macroglossia

I once felt sorry for myself because I didn’t have the words to protect That Boy from the other kids. Everyone called him Slug or Geoduck or Sea Cucumber because of his tongue. That Boy wore stained, greasy jeans like a mechanic and an oversized band tee and a trucker's cap pulled down low. Kids bullied him. They teased and shouted at him. They asked him questions, then stared, nodding, encouraging him to answer with their eyes wide, just to hear. Then they’d laugh at his mumbles and grabbles that barely squeezed between his red lips and gigantic, pink tongue that trickled an endless stream of saliva down his small, white chin. Still, he lingered near those friend groups: jocks, geeks, the musical theater clique. No expression on his face. His massive tongue dangling.

During science class, I watched and listened and at times suppressed a giggle as high schoolers split then poked around the insides of a preserved fetal pig with their shiny surgical blade, saying, “This is like dissecting Geoduck’s tongue.” Not caring about That Boy being within hearing distance. Those high schoolers joked that his tongue might be a Russian doll, tongue inside of tongue inside of tongue, and they wondered how many layers they’d need to peel to get to the center of his Tootsie Pop. They rumored he had a tongue transplant as a baby: an ox, a cow, a blue whale. That Boy made no movements of anger or sadness. He carried on with his cutting, his ignoring. 

The night after we dismembered a sticky, fat, brown toad, another student favorite, I dreamed about That Boy’s tongue. I saw myself standing over him. Scalpel in hand. Slicing a thin incision along his foliate papillae. I had on blue latex gloves. Eggplant-colored scrubs. Black surgical loupes that unnecessarily magnified. That Boy had on jeans and a tee and when his tongue separated in two, I flew back as all the words he could not say—Will you be my best friend, I like spaghetti, Love you, too—flooded the room until I floated to the ceiling, drowning and gagging on nouns and verbs and transitional phrases. That Boy’s words continued to gush and gush, lifting furniture and my laptop and favorite books. When there was no more oxygen in my dream, I woke cotton-mouthed and lay speechful, no longer feeling sorry for myself.

James Morena earned his MFA in Fiction at Mountain View Grand in Southern New Hampshire. His writing has been or is soon to be published in StoryQuarterly, storySouth, Defunkt Magazine, Litro Magazine, The Citron Review, Pithead Chapel, Rio Grande Review and others. He has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.