Anatomically Incorrect Chapter 1: Home Is Where The Husk Is
The tongue you’ll find in my freezer wedged between the stack of
plain cheese pizzas and the small unmarked paper bag, is mine. Not my
tongue as in the one that’s in my mouth, but it’s mine. I own it.
And they’re always trying to take it from me.
I
treasure it like an art collector treasures that original
fifteenth-century…whatever. It’s a prize. It makes me somebody. I’m the
man with the tongue in his freezer. The only difference between me and
the art collector is I can’t display my prize piece on the wall or it
will rot.
If only I knew taxidermy.
My
apartment is one full quarter of the top floor of an old warehouse in a
strange, random outcropping of other warehouses. No walls to divide the
room. Just big dirty windows impossible to see through, cold, open
space, and a heavy sliding door. The lower floors were all rented out
to bands for rehearsal space. The floor thrums endlessly with rampant
bass tones, and sometimes voices echo up eerily through the cracks and
vents.
Every once in a while I bring a girl back to this
peeling, cracking, falling down shithole called home. They always end
up snooping through the freezer. Some woman tactic to find out what
kind of man I am, I assume. Some recognize it right away, some have to
ask. The freezer burn does tend to make it look a little odd. Either
way, the end result is the same: they scramble for their clothing,
slipping silky bras and lacy little panties on as they bolt for the
door. Nubile young nymphos fleeing drunk into the night. Some make it
until morning. It’s so predictable.
They never even bother
to ask why. They just imagine the worst. They picture me prowling the
dark corners and alleys for my next victim, a deviant circus freak, an
escaped mental patient. Surely someone this twisted must have a
personality disorder. A chemical imbalance of one sort or another. It
comforts them to imagine me broken, defective, instead of just like
them.
They see me sitting down beside them at the bar,
twitching and foaming at the mouth. They can’t believe they didn’t
notice it while I was busy sweeping them off their feet. All the sweet
conversation and clit-tingling compliments suddenly makes them sick to
their stomachs. They feel light-headed, berate themselves for not
seeing all the warning signs. And off they go, pulling their jeans,
skirts, designer tops on as they run down the dim hallway in the
disorienting flicker of dying light bulbs.
But at least
they never venture into the freezer until after the sex. After they
have given me that precious, vulnerable moment they can never get back.
There are not enough douches in the world to wash out the lingering
nausea of knowing I was inside them. It will be psychiatrists and
anti-anxiety drugs for the rest of their scarred little lives hiding
indoors, startled whenever the phone rings, hiding beneath the bed with
a steak knife every time there’s a knock at the front door.
All they had to do was ask.
Usually
an hour or so after they bolt, the cops show up at the door.
Flashlights searing retinas, nine-millimeter barrels so close the acrid
fumes from their last use burns the nostrils. Ready to paint the walls
with brain matter.
The paperwork is on the table by the
door for just this occasion, but they arrest me anyway and confiscate
the tongue. My tongue.
A few hours in questioning and they have to let me go. I check BILL ME LATER for the booking fees.
There
was a guy in the news a few years back, foot freshly amputated, kept it
in a bucket on the porch. With a can of beer and a small white toy pony
or something. They arrested him right from his porch, still stitched
and bandaged, hobbling on crutches and cuffed to the car while another
cop bagged the foot as evidence and dumped it in the trunk. To protect
and serve.
Probably figured, since it was his, it belonged
with him rather than a freezer in some lab awaiting tests and bizarre
government experimentation.
The tongue decays some each
time they take it. Black spots and mold become a road map, a timeline
of my feeble existence for the last five years.
If
something is removed from your body, you have the right to keep it.
It’s yours, might as well. Makes for a unique gift on Valentine’s.
Ladies like something special, something from the heart.
Hallmark could never get this personal.
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Anatomically Incorrect is an experimental web series I starting writing
in 2007 and then forgot about. It is copyright ©2009 Charlie Hintz and
may not be reproduced without prior consent.