Silence

This morning you wake with the taste of flesh in your mouth. Not muscle or ambiguous carnage, but flesh. Clean, bloodless. Thin shavings of skin that feel like they might get stuck between your teeth if you aren’t careful. You don’t think you like it. You can’t say that it’s a craving, it isn’t, not quite. You don’t want to eat the flesh, but rather, it’s as if you already have, and now it's stuck on your tongue. Like a song that replays and refuses to leave. You examine your bare arms for bite marks, nothing. You wrack your brain for new explanations, but come up wanting, so you rise. 

The sun is low in the sky, it bleeds through the curtains. It's the usual gold, but to you it feels blue. The floor is chilled beneath your feet, so you pull on woolen socks. The air is brittle. You can see thin wisps of breath blooming from your nostrils. You part your lips and puff. You are a dragon billowing smoke. You are a tea kettle about to scream. You cover the silken nightdress with a knit duster, wrap it tight, smother the cold. You can still taste the flesh. 

You pad into the bathroom, lean against the sink, and stare into the pits of your own eyes. They are still bleary with sleep, but lovely, you think. A kind of pale gray that some might describe as steely. But they don’t feel steely to you. They feel molten and runny. Pools of mercury swirling between thick lashes. You keep them open as you splash your face with cool water that pours from the tap. The tap you turned with the power of your own hand, all the way to on. The water pours at your command. Your chest bubbles warm for a moment, and you chastise yourself for it. You sip some of the water to clear the taste of flesh, but it doesn’t work, so you dry your face, and then you turn the tap again. This time to off, and with a greater indifference. 

There is a gentle clattering of dishes downstairs. A peel of flatware, the scrape of a knife across bone china, the heavy trod of steps. The man is up. The one who lives in your house now. Who eats off of your plates and uses your cutlery. The one you had left sleeping in bed. 

Your mind tells you that you're grateful for him, and you are. Your mind tells you that you are happy now, and you know that you are that too. Your gut turns, and reminds you that you should have been up much earlier. That there should be no need for the man to dig through your cupboards, because you should have met him with breakfast. You’ve wasted too much time worrying about the flesh in your mouth. You are a bad woman, but you’ll have to worry about that later. 

You dress quickly, because now you know the man is waiting for you. You dress modestly, as you always have, then you sit at the small vanity beside the window— the window that insists on letting in all that blue light. You apply your makeup carefully. First the moisturizer, then a primer to protect your skin, then foundation and concealer. You paint your eyes with subtle pinks that match your cheeks, then artfully line your lids and coat your lashes in rich brown. You like wearing makeup. You like that it announces your allegiances, and your strict adherence to your femininity. It’s a government issue now, your femininity. As is the piece of tape that you must wear over your lips. It’s matte black, the tape, stamped at precise intervals with a perfectly demure smile. 

Your mind tells you that you like the tape. It tells you that you like the smiling lips too. You like their hayfever pink, and the gentle upturn at their corners. The delicate plumpness they boast is meant to be appealing, but never alluring. Just as you are meant to be. You like the tape, so you carefully lay the lips over your own mouth, and press down hard to seal. You look happy now. As happy as your mind tells you that you are. You stand. You go downstairs. 

The man looks up from his plate as you enter the kitchen. He flips his wrist to examine his watch. “You're late.” He says. His lips are unbound, so his voice is clear.

You dip your head dolefully, but the tape prevents any greater apology than that. The man grunts in understanding, then continues to scrape at the mass of cold cuts and mustard grotesquely arranged on his plate. Your stomach curdles with guilt at the sight of it. This is not the proper breakfast for a man. Not for yours, not for anyone’s. He catches you staring, and holds out the fork to you. The prongs skewer pink, paper-thin ham smothered in grainy dijon that drips. Your heart nearly shatters at the generosity. 

You hope your steely eyes can portray the proper gratitude as you shake your head, a graceful hand fluttering to the tape by way of explanation. The man nods. He remembers now that you won’t be able to eat until he’s gone to bed. When you can remove the tape, when your lips can breathe again. You don’t mind. The taste of flesh dims your appetite anyway, it grows.  

“We’ll have to skip the park today.” The man says. “We won’t have time before our appointment.” 

You're disappointed. The path to the city through the park takes more time than walking along the main roads, but it's your favorite part of the day. It’s your favorite part of every day. The man knows this. 

Perhaps he’s punishing me for being late? You think, and your cheeks flush red at the thought. Your mind admonishes you for concocting such wicked nonsense. The man is not vindictive, he’s simply right. Of course he’s right. The man is always right. Still, you can’t seem to bring yourself to offer him a gesture of agreement, and you’re glad the tape will smile for you. 

The air outside is brisk and biting. You can feel it clinging to the loose tendrils of your hair, prickling against your scalp. You had thought to put a hat on as you were leaving, but the man said that you wouldn’t need one. Your mind told you that he must be right, that he must know something about your body that you do not. You were grateful that the tape had prevented you from arguing, and now you are angry at your head for being cold. You are angry at your scalp for prickling, and you wish your tongue would stop tasting the flesh. 

The Life Center is warm and crowded. The air is thick and hushed. Men and their women sit in pairs; two by two. The men scratch pens across forms attached to clipboards, emblazoned with names that aren’t theirs. The women stare vaguely at the walls. The tape smiles. 

The first three rows of chairs are reserved for the men whose women’s bellies swell with success. You walk past these. The next rows are designated to the women running out of time. Desperate women, older women. You are still young, you still have time to be of value, so you follow the man further back, to the last four rows of chairs. To the chairs occupied by the men and their women who are simply here to report their monthly failure. Your blood came yesterday, you failed. There is still time. 

You sit beside the man as he fills out the forms that bear your name. Your mind tells you that you are relieved to be free of such burdens. You used to hate ticking those boxes, fitting your family history into those prescribed lines. You wonder why the flesh feels grimy against your teeth.

The sound of the door opening startles you. The man doesn’t notice. No one but you seems to notice. A woman enters. She looks odd to you, and it takes you a moment to pick out why. 

There could be a few reasons, you decide. To start, she is alone. Women are not meant to be alone anymore. Your mind tells you that you are too fragile, too vulnerable, and you know that you are. Your mind tells you that your body needs protecting, and it does. The man has said so, Dear Leader has said so. 

There were days before you realized that you were fragile, and sometimes you marvel at those days. How very ignorant you were then. How very wrong you were in the days when you didn’t feel fragile. You didn’t feel fragile, but the man has said, Dear Leader has said, so now your mind knows, and now you wonder how you could have ever been so inviolably wrong. 

Women are not meant to be alone, and this woman is alone, but that isn’t why she looks odd. So, then, perhaps it's the thick, black thread that weaves between her lips, holds them shut. Perhaps it’s because she’s one of the stitched. Radicals, deviants who refused to see the wisdom of the tape. Who refuse to smile. 

The woman is stitched, the stitched don’t belong in The Life Center, but that also isn’t why she looks odd. You realize now that, in fact, she doesn’t look odd at all, but rather, she looks familiar. Familiar in the old way. Familiar like a dream. 

You think back through the haze. You see her face. You think you might have sat across from that face in dimly lit bars. The kind of bar that seem perennially and inexplicably sticky, like the hands of small children. You think you might have gossiped with her about the cute boy in your Intro to Psych class, while you sipped cheap beer with too few bubbles. You think you might have argued with her about religion and politics. Arguments that began as healthy debates, but quickly dissolved into tension. 

So you would agree to disagree. You would change the topic, remain friends. You would both lie about seeing the other side. But the arguments continued. Your voices grew louder and louder. All the voices grew louder. They grew too loud, until there was no more backing down. Until there was silence. 

Silence that you chose and she fought, but the result is still the same. You’re both silent now. So none of it mattered, in the end. Does that mean you’ve won? Does that mean it was for the best? Your mind tells you that it is. 

In any case, the familiar woman, the stitched woman, that woman looks panicked, feral, nasty. Her eyes dart around the room, moving from woman to woman, and then to their men. The men scratch at the forms, the women stare, the tape smiles— your eyes meet the woman’s. You think she might recognize you too, but there isn’t time to know for sure, because she moves again. 

She scurries to the front of the room and stops. You think you might catch a slight quiver running through her, but then she plants her feet, and such ideas vanish. She’s firm now. She’s resolute. Her eyes fix hard to the back of the room, and you have seen that look before. She reaches into her coat pocket, and retrieves something small and silver. Her hand closes and a blade flicks out clean. Glints dangerously beneath the banks of fluorescent lighting. 

A few of the men look up now, you see them struggling to make sense of this woman. The same way you did. The blade flashes as it moves beneath the light and more eyes find her. The men in the chairs begin to stir. 

The woman hesitates for the briefest moment, before turning the knife on herself. She drags it quickly and smoothly through the stitches. Cuts them loose, lets them dangle, leaves them flaccid. They still drape limply from their calcified knotting, in the pock marks left by the needle that planted them , but the woman’s lips are free now. She peels them back, and a warbling gasp escapes. She tilts her head back and sucks in a clean breath. And then she screams. 

She screams elation. She screams victory. She screams to be heard. To finally be heard! She screams, and you can feel that scream in your own throat. It makes the flesh gum up like soggy bread against the roof of your mouth. Makes the tape begin to itch. 

The men stand then, rising like the tide to swallow the woman up. Drag her back down to the briny depths of their control. Where she belongs. Where you belong. Where you all belong. Your mind tells you to worship their bravery, but the flesh is bitter. They run at the woman, they knock the knife easily from her hand, they grab at her. They try to hold her, but she fights. 

The men are bigger than the woman. They are stronger and more cruel, but she fights. She kicks and she thrashes and she screams. Louder, defiantly, she screams. She screams as one of the men takes hold of her arms. He thinks he’s won, and so he gets close. He gets too close, and the woman leans forward. She opens her newly freed mouth, and then closes it again against the man's neck. He bellows, and she sinks her teeth in deeper, then rips until they come away bloody. 

The woman smiles at you. Smiles with teeth painted in violent red. Teeth dripping in his flesh and her satisfaction. She is still smiling as the men finally overpower her. She smiles as they drag her from the room. She is smiling until the screaming begins again.

You imagine her smiling again when the screaming stops, even though your mind tells you the woman is gone now. She’s gone, and it's good that she’s gone. Your mind tells you to forget, but that smile echoes. Hangs like sun spots etched behind your eyes. 

You taste the flesh. Your mouth begins to salivate.