Autopsy of A Tongue – by Murgatroyd Monaghan

Some of the words died in the water.

I say died, but everyone knows my mother drowned them herself; couldn’t stand the way they made my father look at whiter women. Ever since our arrival in Canada, my mother had been restless, hateful towards our people. It was our accent she couldn’t stand, our words. Never speak our tongue again, she told me. Only English. At first, there was silence. I couldn’t explain how the words had just packed up and left. Didn’t they love us anymore? But one day I walked in on her in the basement and saw her torturing them one by one. She swore me to secrecy as well as silence, but a few words got around. I knew what they all said about my father: in the playground, at family dinners. Got himself a foreign whore, brought her kid back too. And, trophy wife, dumb as shit, can’t understand nothin’. My mother only listened placidly in smiling silence while she planned a revenge that wouldn’t get her deported. The words she spoke to us were the first to go. She kept a few words stripped naked and barely alive in a cage that I soldered for her at public school; only took her coilne off the wrought iron when she drank. A word or two would always slip out then. The rest of the time, she drugged them; whipped them with heavy chains and poured bleach down their sordid throats. The report says those words died of blunt force trauma.

Other words died in the earth.

I say died, but everyone knows my mother buried them herself while they were still alive, with the shovel my sister bought at K-Mart. On the weekends she would haul her fat shoulders together and apart as she heaved wet soil over pregnant mothers and elderly women, any word that begged for its life in the wrong language. I tried very hard not to be wrong as well; began to hate the words that clung desperately to my chest like infants. These were the words my mouth returned like unwanted gifts to older relatives at polite parties, the linguistic tinnitus of curtsies and curly wires I would wrap absently around my fragile neck as I chatted with my mother’s grandfather in broken English on our rotary phone, so conscious of my accent clawing its way back up my throat that I was sweating. Even underground, those words refused to die for years. “I can’t say it, I told you,” I’d spit, crumbling under my grandfather’s long-distance weight. “She told me no Gujerati,” my whine came. And after the static rumbling of his further protests: “…and no Hindi either.” My grandad muttered that she was a prostitute, and a witch, but I told her he said the words for good mother. The words got sick as soon as I spoke them. The report for good mother says cancer, I think. Invasive, metastatic; slow.

Then there are the words that died in the air.

I say died, but everyone knows my mother is the one who filled those plastic sacks with Party City-issue helium and stretched them mercilessly over the words’ foreign heads. Their fuzzy hair stretched wide inside those colourful electrostatic Dyson spheres as if their bindis did not contain the very sun. These words were the innocents she secretly wished she could send back across the water to keep them safe, but when a word or two would get back there, more and more would just keep coming until she knew she couldn’t take any chances. These were the words printed on instruction manuals, on clothing labels; the one my mother shot at point blank range when I asked her for a translation of something semi-familiar on a cereal box before she tied its lolling head to a balloon and made me swear that I would forget its frozen face entirely. When I didn’t know the word for something, I learned to grab the word in our own language from her dungeon, torture it for information, and then wash my mouth out carefully with a bar of Ivory soap. It was at this time that I took the very last lullaby, wrapped it in the coilne cloth, and ate it. The soap and the helium never touched it. To this day, I can reach deep into my stomach and find this lullaby to sing to my children. The report for the word on the cereal box says: massive internal bleeding, hypercapnia; hope.

My ears are finally empty.

I say empty, but the scent of rotting vowels remains, as pure and swollen as an echo. It took years for the undertaker to come and collect the last of the bodies. The skeletons stayed sharp until the end, rows on rows of angular hip bones pointing stupidly at the ceiling, but every time I looked up, there was only English there. There used to be a few of the old words left, the ones from back home; the strong ones. The survivors. When I felt lost, I used to bounce on the belly of these words, mattress springs coiled like reflexes that shot me up, up, scraping my fingertips across the stucco until crumbs of it came free and rained down over us. I would say, “look Mama, look, I touched it, see, I touched it,” but if she ever said “yes, I see,” the words have since died. Maybe she didn’t speak. And I am still lost, though I no longer need to jump to reach the ceiling. I cannot define the words in the lullaby, but I sleep soundly. The report says my mother’s corpse is still covered in crumbs.

Murgatroyd Monaghan is an Autistic mother, poet and writer of mixed descent. She teaches writing in various settings, and places in some cool contests sometimes. When she isn’t writing, she and her children can be found in her giant, fluffy bed, discussing Star Trek.