Butchered Tongue by Gunnar De Winter
3600 words, ~18 minutes reading time
Issue 6 (Fall 2024)
At fifteen months old, all children in Omphalos receive their first lingual surgery: a small resection at the sides of the tongue and a rounding of its tip. Previously unconstrained baby talk is leashed, sounds are corralled into words, and mouths are prepared to speak Hymnal and nothing else.
It's always painful for parents to watch. Samma knows this and she knows the necessity of the procedure. Still, it hurts when her baby girl – Lacie – is placed into her arms after the procedure, blood wiped clean, wailing for all the ancient gods to hear even though Hymnal reduced the pantheon to a single god.
"She did well," the nurse says, each word crisp and perfectly enunciated. Between the mask and the cap, the woman's eyes are kind. She strokes Lacie's reddened cheek and then nods at Samma. Case closed, on to the next one.
"Shh," Samma whispers while she runs her finger over the bridge of Lacie's nose and glides out of the hospital waiting room. Her tears burn hot as she holds them inside.
In reply, Lacie picks up her wailing, which opens the wounds on her tiny tongue, and that, in turn, cues more wailing.
"I'm sorry, sweetheart, I'm sorry." Samma picks up her pace as she makes her way across the broad sandstone avenue, the slate tiles glittering in the relentless sun.
Lacie's wail dwindles into a sad prattle, and Samma coos nonsense at her daughter. Only baby talk is allowed to be nonsensical in Omphalos. Speech among adults should be clear and efficient to avoid fines. Words cannot stray. Neither does Samma stray on the way home. Broad avenue becomes shopping boulevard becomes, eventually, the street – a single row of the ubiquitous tiles lined by slim gutters – where Samma lives. She sweats beneath her finely woven dark orange sari.
Holding Lacie, whose complaints have shifted from pain to fatigue (such things a mother knows), Samma closes the metal-grilled door behind her with one hand. She kicks off her sandals and walks across the cool floor of the atrium toward the nursery. She insisted on having the nursery at the back of the house, away from the streets. Away from the prying ears. It’s the one deviation from the standard Omphalon villa her husband Renat, a successful merchant, granted her.
Sunlight dances through the thread of the nursery's beige curtains and sails over the black waves Samma painted on the walls. She lowers Lacie into her crib. Prattle, prattle. Lacie squirms to get settled for a nap, exhausted by the pain, Samma quickly checks the rest of the house, fast enough for her absence to remain unnoticed.
When Samma returns, heart hammering against her ribs but satisfied she and her daughter are all alone, she gets on her knees and pulls a small wooden box from underneath Lacie's crib. Lacquered and engraved, it has been in her family for generations. Only close inspection would reveal minor scuffs. It has been treated like the treasure it holds. Inside the box, nestled within burgundy velvet, rests a prosthetic tongue. The dull gray metal and weathered golden teeth slots do not do justice to the flexibility of this weapon.
Samma fits the prosthetic in her mouth and – as if by instinct – it finds its place, like a glove for her butchered tongue. It is history, it is culture, it is everything that has been cut away from her. In this moment, humming an ancient song to her baby daughter, Samma is free. She hides rebellious rhymes in the lullabies, daggers of melodious defiance.
The stylized waves on the otherwise bare walls come alive. The black design transforms into an ocean of blues and greens, each line heaving and roiling, awakened by ancient words that are rich and thick as honey in Samma’s mouth. Colors far richer than Omphalos' grays and beiges and coppers fill the small room. They are vast, they are power, they are everything the Omphalans fear. Everything that Hymnal has erased.
Lacie smiles and waves her chubby arms before yielding to sleep.
Samma removes the tongue, hides it again beneath her daughter's crib, and wipes the tears from her cheeks. "I'm so sorry, sweetie."
Lacie dreams of ghosts in greens and blues, while Samma argues with Renat. It is dangerous, he says in a rare admission of knowing about Samma’s songs.
It is life, she replies.
Lacie receives her next surgery when she is six years old.
Some of her friends already had it, so she pestered Samma and Renat for it until they relented. She has shown no desire to speak Samma’s native tongue, but instinctively knows to keep it a secret. Even from Renat, who can plausibly deny if Samma is ever caught. Now, when the day has arrived, Lacie grips Samma's hand tightly while waiting in a hospital bed that is too large for her. Lacie is nervous, but not afraid. She is fiery and strong. Samma is proud of her, but it is a bitter pride, the pride of her daughter bearing a burden that should not be borne by a child.
While Lacie is in the operating room, Samma paces and picks her lips. It's a minor surgery, merely shaving the tongue's sides and deepening the central fissure to make sure Lacie's words fit like keys into the slots Hymnal provides.
Samma's tongue runs across the inside of her teeth. The muscle feels like a foreign object in her mouth, flapping in the wind of her breath as it seeks words she can no longer speak. She wants to burn down this hospital. Her anger surprises her; a flame carried by waves of green and blue, powered by ancient songs the world no longer hears.
Holding the hand of a nurse, Lacie returns with a swollen face. Samma's lips shake. She is so strong, her little girl. Maybe she will be –
No, she cannot add yet another weight to her daughter's already loaded shoulders. "Hello, sweetheart."
Lacie looks at her, green and blue flames in her bright eyes.
"She did very well," the nurse says, with a pride she has no right to feel. Samma nods with pursed lips. She doesn’t feel well. A minor surgery can still be a big step; a step away from the culture that shaped her family tree. She doesn’t want Lacie to have the surgeries at all but that would leave her daughter an outcast at best. The place in the world for anything but Omphalan rule shrinks with each breath. Or each cut.
Samma takes Lacie's hand and they walk away, both with burning cheeks. Shame for Samma, injury for Lacie. "You were so very brave, sweetheart."
Lacie does not look at Samma. The girl keeps her eyes on the boulevard, eyes that shine with unshed tears. Samma's heart cracks, but she cannot find the words to soothe her daughter. Is their bond breaking? Samma, one foot in the past, and Lacie, running toward the future. They walk hand in hand, in silence.
When they step over the gutter separating their house from the street, Lacie sniffs once and then heads to her room. No more crib, but a small bed. Black stars have joined the waves on the walls.
Samma still tells her daughter stories and today, she knows Lacie needs one. Or maybe it’s Samma who needs it? How well does she know her daughter, really? Her daughter who is so eager to mold herself into the image Hymnal provides? She tucks in her daughter, who glowers at the ceiling, the only unpainted side of the room – the stars have not yet found their way there. Samma will start painting them tomorrow. First, she will console her bright and beautiful, and brightly, beautifully stubborn daughter.
Samma puts the prosthetic tongue in place and feels whole again. With the ability to speak the language that colors her soul comes breath and power and a place of being. A way of being. The ocean roils to wash the ghosts of her culture over her daughter. But–
Lacie's eyes widen, and her little nostrils flare. "Mommy! Those are bad words." Her daughter has never said that before. Samma’s heart stutters and the crack in it widens, and her voice breaks. Her tongue, formerly flexible, becomes lead in her mouth, and she spits it out. No more oceans, only bare walls with the illusion of a different world flattened onto them.
Samma hurries to the bathroom of polished sandstone and holds the edges of the washbasin to prevent herself from shattering. She does not recognize the woman in the mirror, staring back with glistening eyes.
Again, Samma is so proud. Again, her heart breaks. That's the thing about hearts; they latch onto the faintest glimmer of hope to regenerate themselves.
Lacie undergoes her third and final surgery at age fifteen, one year early. The reason for the advanced timing is that Lacie has been selected for the choir. Her command of Hymnal, her teachers say, is exemplary. Samma is proud of Lacie’s achievements but quietly curses the surgeries that enabled them.
A few days after the surgery, her cheeks still burning, Lacie stands on the stage in the middle of the central plaza among other girls. In her bright white robe and golden crown, she sings through the pain that still colors her face. Hymnal is a sharp, choppy language. It cuts the air like the Omphalan army cuts the world into territories to tax and control.
And yet.
And yet, Lacie sings like an angel, even if she sings a paean to a foreign god who is not part of Samma's banished pantheon. Samma tries to bury her grief next to the slabs of tongue that have been cut away, much like the old gods that were slain by the belligerent new religion of Omphalos. What if her loss gives her daughter life? A full life, like the one she never had. If this is the sacrifice, Samma pays it gladly. Omphalos has already taken its pound of flesh.
When Lacie finishes and follows the other girls off the stage, she glows with sweat, with inflammation, and with something that hangs between her and her mother, something that remains unspoken in all possible tongues. A rift, perhaps, severing a cultural umbilical.
They walk home to pick up Lacie's sparse belongings for her move to the singer's academy – an honor! The walk, though, is a wake of mutually agreed discomfort. Renat beams, Samma wavers, and Lacie scowls at the street tiles. She drags her feet, which rings alarm bells in Samma's mind. Lacie never drags her feet.
"Is everything alright, dear?"
Lacie glances at her mother, puckered lips twitching as if she wants to speak. Lacie remains silent, but Samma knows there’s something lurking beneath her daughter’s doubtful features. She wants to ask, to push across the growing divide, but then she sees the pointy copper helmets of the soldiers flicker in the evening sun. They are still leaving the house when the family arrives and drag along a trunk with possessions. Samma glances at Lacie, who does not appear surprised. Did her daughter plan this? Two soldiers leave the house with… buckets of paint? Bland, broken white paint. Why would they…? The waves on the walls! Samma moves to make her way inside.
"Wait here," Renat holds out an arm and walks over to the soldiers.
A few bitten remarks, short and sharp, and Renat folds in on himself, almost shrinking to half his size. Omphalos, again, prevails.
One of the soldiers, a man who seems slightly too small for his clattering armor, walks over to Samma and Lacie, holding out a bag of red fabric. "Singer? Is this everything?"
Lacie swallows and nods. Samma sees her daughter steel herself. "I'm leaving for the Academy, Mom." Lacie's voice is level, her Hymnal free of any remaining children’s accent.
"Already? I thought we'd have a few moments to say goodbye?" Samma feels like tearing herself apart: one piece of her to scream and rage at the soldiers in a language they will never understand, another to grab her daughter and miraculously fix the rift between them, one more to scrape the paint off the walls and reinstate the waves in their former glory, and lastly, a piece of her to run away from Omphalos, to the forest and the trees and the sea beyond.
Instead, Samma only grasps the air when Lacie turns and follows the soldiers who keep a few deferential paces of distance between themselves and the girl who sings to their god.
When she breaks out of her stupor, Samma detaches herself from Renat's half-assed attempt at an embrace and she runs into their desecrated home, to Lacie's room and the bed that stands there, to the box of lacquered wood underneath the bed. A box that is gone. Her precious tongue, taken by the soldiers, along with her daughter.
She has nothing left. She crumples to the floor, wanting to dissolve, past the stone and into the ancient soil. Everything here is smooth and gray and beige. Her hands and feet still remember the dark, rich soil of the fields to the north of her childhood village; her mind’s eye the vivid greens of the canopy and the colorful explosion of playful flowers.
Within days, Renat has checked out of their marriage, but it's almost as if Lacie's success (at this thought, Samma briefly returns to her body and almost vomits) is a mission achieved for him. He’s still around, but his presence reveals itself through the movement of an empty chair or a half-made bed. They were happy once, close even, weren't they? It's hard to remember. With her tongue gone, Samma's memories fade too.
At night, the burning grief Samma tried to bury returns; a zombie tongue speaking a dying language.
Lacie is thirty-one years old, and she is magnificent.
This is the plan. This has always been the plan. She’s been listening to ghosts since she was a little girl. “You are the arrow,” they sang in her mother’s true voice, “that will be our revenge. But first, you must fly alone.”
Like her mother, Lacie is not tall. Unlike her mother, she walks with the square shoulders and a tilted chin that her station affords her. She is one of the First Singers; a paragon of pure Hymnal and an icon of Omphalos.
Upon closing the door of her private quarters in the Academy, her mask flickers. It becomes heavier every day. She flicks the hood of her robe over the waves of her auburn hair, a blend of her mother’s black and father’s russet. The marble halls and glinting corridors of the Academy are as familiar as the words on her lips. They have been both her home and her place of exile for over half her life. Yet, for the first time in years, she feels the need to visit her childhood home, if only to see it, as if to remind herself she did not dream her early days.
The guards nod as she passes through one of the small trellised gates reserved for Academy members. There is no need for subterfuge; no one questions her. Still, Lacie feels the need to cover herself, to shield herself from prying ears.
The Academy may be her home, but the streets in which she was raised lift the weight off her shoulders, and she takes a breath of cool evening air that fills her lungs and dances across her precious vocal cords.
She moves swiftly, until her feet stutter when she sees the old house. The humble exterior is clean and well-kept, but lifeless. A few bare and dry creeper stalks hold on to narrow cracks in the stone. A fool's errand; a last gasp. Once, the creepers exploded with waxy leaves and bright white flowers the size of pinpricks. Taking care of them was one of her mother’s little joys. Little rebellions too, perhaps.
Lacie exhales slowly and then opens the door. "Mother?"
A few years ago, her father passed away. Renat had died as he had lived, quiet and unassuming, simply doing his job for the greater glory of Omphalos. When she had received the note, she kept her tears to herself, allowing them only to emerge in her room at night. She did not go to the funeral, to maintain the image that she had left her former life behind. Maybe that’s why she’s here too, for memories and apologies.
As she moves through the house, Lacie hears the ghosts in every room, telling stories muffled by beige paint. Ghosts, she knows, are both patient and persistent. With the right weapon, they can break empires. "Mother?" The word echoes; an expanding wave rushing through the house, seeking and dragging Lacie along.
Samma sits in a wicker chair in Lacie's old bedroom, the only room in the house not subjected to a slow invasion of dust. In the dull gray of Samma's eyes, framed by a wizened face the color of cracked parchment, Lacie sees a flicker of recognition. Memories are erasing themselves from Samma's mind, like the words of the other language that rest flightless on the tip of her mangled tongue.
At last, Lacie lets her true self leak through. Just once. She drops to her knees and holds her mother's hand in hers. "I had to be what they wanted me to be." Her voice breaks; her tongue aches. The words in Hymnal do not suffice. They cannot contain the pain and give it the sounds it deserves. "It was the only way. You understand that, don't you? Mom? Mommy?"
And Lacie is a little girl again. Still. Always.
She leaves her mother's body in the chair.
The ghosts in her mother's silver-tongued stories showed her how Omphalos poisons the water that laps at its edges. But an arrow that strikes the center? Now there, the ghosts told little Lacie in her dreams, is an idea. She will be the arrow, and the curse of the arrow is to fly alone once it leaves the quiver.
The way to break Omphalos is from the center outward, with a tsunami of words in a forbidden language.
Lacie will be the one who speaks it.
Lacie is ancient and still thirty-one years old when she gets back to her chambers.
Her hand shakes as she stirs a teaspoon of honey into a cup of ginger tea. Her voice must be strong enough to carry the weight of the old ghosts.
The sun tiptoes into her sitting room through narrow windows. Here, she receives the wealthy who seek blessings from a First Singer. If only they knew. She gets up and stretches before taking a deep breath that tastes stale. Lacie takes her tea and retreats to her canopy bed, but sleep eludes her; every time she closes her eyes, Lacie sees the pain in her mother's eyes. She dabs at the tear streaking down her left cheek and tastes it. Salty, like the sea she only knows from her lullabies.
The hint of salt reminds her of the cold, honey-thickened tea on the nightstand. She forces it down her throat to coat her vocal cords. She suppresses a shudder. It has lost its richness, being reduced to a mere vehicle of efficiency, much like Hymnal, the language she made herself excel in to do the ghosts’ bidding–the surgeries, the singing, the reshaping herself into a herald of an imposed culture by pretending to turn her back on her mother. The arrow flies alone, she thinks as she considers what must be done. The price has been steep. Two lives, and many more before. How much of the choice was hers and how much was the slowly unfurling plan of the ghosts in her mother’s stories? When language becomes oppression, lullabies will be revolution.
Another tear. She focuses on feeling the drop slowly making its way down her face. When it hits her jaw, it rolls down to the tip of her chin and hangs there, precariously, until, finally, it lets go.
Lacie blinks. Hours have passed. Time ebbs and flows with the tide beyond the horizon; the pull of the ocean she has never seen but feels with each heartbeat.
Then, there is a song, as high and bright as the crystal chandeliers in the vaulted corridors of the Academy. The words are not in the familiar Hymnal that Lacie knows so well.
On the window sill sits a bird not endemic to Omphalos, iridescent purple, a dash of color in a city of pastels; a clarion call, a herald of the wind. With the bird comes an ocean breeze that had woven through the forest and scaled the walls with less than a thought, an inexorable, silent march of resistance.
Lacie turns her head to the sky and closes her eyes. She feels the heat of the midday sun on her face.
Time leaps one last time.
The sun is setting and, unbeknownst, Omphalos glitters on the first of its final days.
Lacie knows it will take time, the siege of ghosts is a slow drum, turning the usurper city to rubble one broken brick at a time. Then, from the rubble, rebirth.
A knock on her door. "First Singer?" A deferential voice, in almost-perfect Hymnal.
"I am coming." Lacie's Hymnal is better still.
She gets on her knees on the side of her luxurious bed and pats the wooden frame until she finds the box that she snuck into her bag of personal belongings half a lifetime ago.
Tonight, Lacie will sing, and the foundations of Omphalos will shake. She will stand on the stage, the city silent, and her words will echo through the streets and avenues. Backed by her pantheon, she will sing.
With the thunder of thousands.
With her mother's tongue.