The Magnifying Tongue

by Matt Dennison

Matt is this month’s winner of $562.50 for his deep aesthetic and ability to tell a story through subtext.

Submissions this month are also coming in lighter than expected. Remember that reprints are allowed, so don’t hesitate to send your story to “shortstorystack@gmail.com”

Bio: Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) and Waiting for Better, from Main Street Rag Press. His work has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider and Cider Press Review, among others. 

Without further ado, “The Magnifying Tongue” by Matt Dennison.

“Blood Son!”

       At the sudden horse-calling of my brother’s old nickname, I looked up from the table, a length of greens hanging from my lips. When the voice called again, I handed my plate to the child left of me, grabbed my sketchbook off the table and ran out to look for my older brother in the swarm of Daddy’s church family that filled the house.

       The squeaks from Harold’s leg brace grew louder as he moved off the front porch and walked toward us. Taller than any man present, the light from the porch cast a gentle glow on him from behind, revealing the white moths and June bugs that traveled within his fine, curly hair. When he ducked into the crowd in front of the parlor, I slid up behind him and stayed close as we made our way across the room, the dark sea of buckles and dungarees parting left and right until he stepped to the side and there, sprawled on the horsehair divan, was Daddy, swimming in the folds of Brother Doyle’s old seersucker worn over everyday clothes, work boots showing from the double-cuffed pants. Close enough to see the face that had taken on the color and smear of river clay, I watched as Daddy’s hand rose through the oil lamp shadows, found Harold’s ear and pulled him down.

       “Tell ‘em we marched, when they ask, and they will, the bastards,” he said, the words barely rising above his sunken lips. “And don’t forget the trumpets!”

       Harold nodded the best he could while I knelt by the divan and maneuvered my book into position for a rare close-up sketch of Daddy’s God-Rope, that lightning-struck coil of hair that he braided and swirled thrice around his skull and deep into his cauliflowered boxing ear where, for all we knew, it continued to grow.

       “…oh, the devil’s had a shine for me for years...” I heard him sigh as he flicked Harold away, reached for the vinegar sponge and sucked it hard before resuming his self-conducted rites and confession, every word of which was written down by Brother Harmon in case anything of spiritual or genealogical importance was revealed.

       By “marched,” as we all knew, Daddy meant paraded from our house to the new store-front church on the other side of town with him in the lead—a bit weak after rising from his deathbed, and certainly helped along by a few of his “angels,” but marching, leading the way, triumphant over the whores, harpies and lie-mongers who had hounded him unto death in the church of his own making. And though I was looking forward to the blessed event as much as anyone, I knew that the first step—the dying—was to take place that night.

“And The Coil of Ten Thousand shall rise!” he gasped a short while later, one eye wildly open, the other floating in its basin of lid and pearl as he palmed his teeth back in and waved away the crowding faces in order to begin the final damning of the fiends before his passion play did run. Unreeled from memory, perfected through the years, the recitation was at once complex, quick enough, and strangely comforting. For even his demons had demons, it appeared, and though he cursed them each by name, I believe he was respectful of that fact.

“Abigor, I damn thee,” he began. “Asmodeus, most foul. Belial, thou quillish beast...”

As the names poured out, Daddy’s look changed to that of a soul in delicious and familiar torment. Twisting like a hoe-chopped snake, he struggled to rend the shapes with no shape that roiled the air above his head while two of our strongest held him down and Harold kept his boots in check—the more dangerous position, for Daddy had danced in his father’s traveling show, I heard him shout one night after he had crawled in through his window and crashed to the floor, and dearly loved to kick. Ordinarily I would stand, unnoticed, in a far corner as Daddy raged his devil-curse throughout the room, but that night, knowing I would be spared the task of restoring the room after the fact, I closed my eyes and settled against the rattling, thumping, divan, echoing the names and moving my hand over the drawings I had made of each dark, imagined face.

So on we worked, like countless nights before, just in a more curious layout—pulling the same cart through the same mud and darkness, but in slightly different directions. For though I had seen the devil lick his lips at me through my mother’s eyes, I believed the attack, the attempt to sew his tail to my name, would come at my father’s gate, and I did not step in the tracks left by the others.

Since that night I have come to believe that Daddy’s departure, though timely in a general sense, was dangerously premature in its particulars. All had been summoned, but only a handful of demons had withered in the air before his fingers twisted in a wilt of pouty surprise and he was no more. Who knows what chaos and ruin those fiends have set loose over the years? These days I need only look across the hall to see my twisted proof.

#

       Before news of his passing had left the room, what men were not present came running from all corners of the house. Splitter, Daddy’s first-born, who spent most evenings singing and making tongue-shadows in front of the stove, pushed his way into the clearing, giving out a high-pitched guffaw and slapping his knee when he saw Daddy’s lifeless form. Brother Grisdack, our one church member with medical experience—though his focus was primarily the larger farm animals—pulled up a stool, polished the bottom of his snuff can on his massive thigh and held the shiny disk under Daddy’s nose, his own heavy breaths filling the room as we hunched forward and waited.

When a close examination revealed no fog, Brother Grisdack jumped up, ripped open the seersucker and gave Daddy’s sunken chest a blow fit to stun a horse for gelding. Counting off the time on his pocket watch, he waited a full ten seconds then pinched Daddy’s nostrils in an upward, grinding, twitch, bent his head over the back of the divan and searched for a pulse up and down his arm, under his jaw, and against his temple—tapping on that twisted side-vein harder and harder until Brother Doyle reached out, placed his hand over Daddy’s eyes and lowered the bruised, magnetic, lids.

Before anyone could shout for glory, Splitter shoved Brothers Doyle and Grisdack aside, pulled Daddy’s eyes back and blew mightily—giving me time for a quick sketch of the horizon beyond the watery orbs—then knelt beside me, humming and rocking as he smoothed and patted Daddy’s hair.

Pressed against the divan by the dark crush of others, I watched Splitter’s curious forefinger twisting and looping Daddy’s shock-white braid as the room grew warm with nervous hallelujahs. A momentary opening appeared between the legs and I saw a couple of our oldest members sitting against the back wall, pointing to their chests and smiling at each other. When the scene collapsed, I glanced back at Daddy and saw what they were smiling about: a triple-columned list of women’s names tattooed on his chest from navel to sternum, all but the last four names inked over with “sinner!“

I quickly straddled the divan, opened my book over Daddy’s legs and set to work transcribing the names—some of them quite familiar—finishing just in time to see Splitter’s finger pull the hairy core from Daddy’s ear with a swift, sucking ‘pop.’ I flipped back a page, scrawled ‘?!’ beneath my God-Rope sketch then struggled to reinsert the plug that reeked of birth and the escaping word of God as Brother Doyle pried Harold’s hands from Daddy’s boots and said “Go tell the women.” With a final, mostly successful, push of the slick-furred mass, I ran after Harold as he clomped toward the back of the house, his braced leg swinging like an old hay baler.

       Tacked on the winter before when Mother announced, one night after the blessing of our hell-heads and before the plates were passed, that there would be no more cooking without proper walls around her, the slope-floored kitchen had quickly become a refuge for the women whenever important business was at hand. On that night of overwhelming consequence, it hummed like a tray of honey bees left out in the sun. Charged by the heat and bustle of every cooking woman we had, Harold walked straight in while I waited by the door, searching for Mother and table scraps in the sea of similar women.

After a minute or so I found her, elbow-deep in the grease-topped water of the sink, and watched as her head lowered then straightened with the news. When she turned and saw me backing away, a handful of apple peelings moving toward my pocket, her face curled inward then burst in a great unraveling as she threw her dishrag at me, cried, “Wash the crazy out of your eyes!” and walked from the room. Once she was safely on her way, I leaned my head out the doorway and watched her float up the shadowy hall to settle by Daddy’s side, to take his hand and begin her three-day wait for the magnifying tongue, the consecrated toe testing the waters of our faith as the world did deeply fail and please.

#

       Looking back, Daddy’s punctuality was the only virtue present in the entire affair, in my opinion. For how can a grown man, a preacher, no less, announce his upcoming death at the hand of a member of his own church when the weapon of choice, collard greens poisoning, had no existence in fact? I looked for it in the medical dictionary Mother kept under the sink along with the paregoric empties and teratoma jars, and came away with nothing but a strange empty feeling. That we had all eaten from the same pot of greens, that the accused man, Brother Crenshaw, had not been allowed in the kitchen since that time with the pressure cooker, and that Sister Crenshaw, the wife of the accused, had given birth a few years back to a girl-child whose narrow face, wild hair and pinched, piercing, gaze mirrored Daddy’s closely enough to cause him to pull his hair straight out from his head and curse the beautiful rut-flowers that lined the pathways to Hell…now these were facts.

       I believe the puzzled looks that met his accusations against Brother Crenshaw made it clear even to Daddy that his plan lacked the fireworks and logic necessary to stop the rumors surrounding the child, and so he went searching for a spectacle powerful enough to induce outright amnesia in all who witnessed it. Martyrdom followed by a cleansing resurrection came to mind rather quickly, I imagine, though for whose sins he was dying was a bit unclear. If asked, I’m sure he would have said Theirs! and if they thought about it at all, they too would have said Theirs! by which they would have meant some vague but threatening concept of Them.

       Either way, I believe Daddy decided it would be best for his purposes simply to die and rise in fact and believed, as did many, that he would. For while we sat, clothed and comforted, for the most part, every Wednesday and twice on Sunday, Daddy’s faith was large enough to douse the wicked and the wise, and on hearing the news of his upcoming miracle the child was soon forgot.

       These church meetings, the rough center beam of our forty or so lives, typically began with Sister Lundgren pressing out hymns on her lap organ, one foot working the bellow, the other resting on a small wooden box as she trained her spinster gaze upon us. Daddy, dressed as always in the boots and work-clothes from his days at the furniture factory, would be seated on a folding chair beside her, eyes shut, arms crossed and body gently rocking as the notes and voices filled the air. When his tongue had found the drop of manna required to begin, he would lift one finger, stopping the music and much of the breathing in the draped-off storefront. I realize now he was probably just trying to dislodge some grains of cornbread from one of his plates, but at the time, even his fluttering cheek-pokes appeared to be an act of holy divination.

       Greatly preferring the devil-themed messages that tended to follow a left-eye opening, I often attempted to influence the nature of the message to come. With his eyes still battling over which would open first, I would gouge my bet into the lacquer of my folding chair—front support for left eye, back support for right—then rapid-fire blink my betting eye as I squeezed the brailed rasp of my wager in hopes it would match, if not directly influence, his own eye-choice. So blankety-strobe went the simple-stick world as one man’s attempt to join our lives with the holy did begin.

A practical man by nature—when need be, he could cook in tongues, having called forth entire meals from what looked to be an empty pantry while the kitchen was being built—Daddy used what words and common saws he had to do his uncommon work. And though quick as any man to offer his bicep for inspection or smash a piece of furniture when the need arose, Daddy was also blessed with a fate of patience and knew that for the miracle to spark he had to build his message slowly, like a child’s headlong rush into the infinite: walking then skipping then running downhill faster and faster until he finds himself tumbling through air and—Praise God!—his words, beaten senseless on the anvil of repetition and whatever hollering it took and then some, had once more caused the beast-half-lamb to walk straight into the hardest heart.

Sometimes catching the spirit was easy as opening a door and hopping on a heaven-bound cloud. Other times it was like trying to catch cats with quiet mice. In those moments of accelerating terror, when all the slant adjectives of his childhood had come into play only to be found wanting and he, himself, had been reduced to a raging mass of frustrate profanity, he would apologize, to the Lord first, lead us in a flat-basket prayer and disappear through the back of the building to be gone for days—which made it all the more miraculous when “take-off,” for lack of a better word, did occur.

By the end of a scorcher, however, as he called his better sermons, where the whole human story appeared to ripen and flow down his throat to be howled back salty in the stress-harmonies of abuse and adoration, he would be dancing through invisible flames, staggering, jumping and shaking until at last he straightened like a hanged man and held-held-held before crashing to the floor. Exhausted, risen to one knee, he would shore up heaven with his left hand while flicking and hitching up his right pant leg with the other as Sister Lundgren, who had been following his actions with the alternating chords of some jumpy hymn, ran her elbow across the keys and kicked the box toward him as the split black tongue of the lonely asp forced the lid aside and church proper was on.

#

       Before the sun had warmed much of anything the morning after Daddy’s passing, we kids were awake, unable to control our excitement at the marching and trumpet blowing to come. I think part of us felt he was simply taking a monumental three-day nap, which, though not common, was possible, for Daddy had always slept hard and had the scars to prove it.

The twisted-up bugle the man on the back of the garbage truck had thrown at us when we got too close—which made him an angel, Harold said as he snatched the horn from Splitter’s open hand—was about it, for trumpets, so I showed The Twins and some of the smaller children how to put thumb to lip, wiggle their fingers and make that hooo-ing sound as we marched through every room except the kitchen, down the main hallway, up the stairs and out the back window to shimmy down Daddy’s rope and tie the marching knot right through the front with such a shriek and holler that the whole house throbbed in alarm.

“Pump!” Harold would shout, demonstrating with his heavy foot, and we stomped for Daddy’s heart until teacups rattled on their shelves. “Victory!” and Splitter showed us how to shout for joy, for we believed our voices and feet to be the deep machines of Daddy’s quick and certain revival—that, and Mother for what looked to be three straight days of holding Daddy’s hand while singing, fasting and praying behind the parlor door, though all the while, we found out later, she was eating corn on the cob and sipping her invigorating tea.

Crouched by the door, Harold and I would hear the rise and fall of her muffled voice, a sudden pause, and the dull thunk of what was the first chewed-and-sucked-over cob of the night hitting the bottom of the pan which, when full, was set on the back steps to be replaced with a fresh one—jelly-jar of ‘shine inside—by the local handyman whose interests, according to Splitter, lay more in his customer’s whiskey stills and chickens than in their leaky pipes—for it was common knowledge that sweet corn and moonshine stolen at midnight and taken together was good to ward off both sleep and ghostly visitations.

But except for the acapella-hymn-inspired “clapping of the hands,” the occasional face slap, we assumed of her own, her walking prayers, private moments and all the grievous duties of the night, Mother did never let go Daddy’s hand.

#

       Late on the third day I snuck into the parlor. My entrance was apparently a catalyst of sorts, for the various perfumes—and there were several—solidified in amber-colored swirls that hung in the air like glassy, sick-bed sheets. I raised my hand, expecting the touch of the ice-mouth on my fingertips, but when several panes shattered at my touch, understanding lifted my arms and turned me in head-down circles until Mother was revealed what seemed miles away: sitting by the window, hair undone, her arm-length sleeves ripped off to hang, still buttoned, from her wrists. Leaning forward in the chair next to Daddy, she studied the deep-flesh cuts across her arms and shoulders, occasionally touching fingers to tongue to salt bowl and tracing the course of her wounds as a thin band of light crossed and re-crossed the back of her wrist, cutting free the shadows that had stilled the room.

Once more able to stand, she draped her handkerchief over Daddy’s face, reached across him and pulled back the curtain, admitting what remained of the light that had tired itself against the cloth all day. I must have jumped, because she reared back, eyes smoldering through the motes as she searched the room—checking the corners for ghosts or Indians, I imagine, newly-born fear joining lifelong obsession in her strange new world.

When she saw me behind the coat tree, she squinted and moved her head about until she recognized me, then smiled and pointed to the floor. I didn’t move right off, so she nodded eagerly and gestured low. It’s not that I didn’t know what to do, but normally it was a pinched and rattled anger that gave command, not the quiet dishevelment before me. So be it. I laid my book on the sideboard, carefully removed my shoes, collapsed forward and began to swim the floor to her—slapped boards and kicked as if water and salt-air filled the room, all the while making the muffled, curious, cries I had learned in order to please.

As always, it was a long, carefully observed, intensely critiqued journey and one which was never, to my knowledge, satisfying to Mother, who had typically stepped back and laughed, stepped back and cried. This time a hand reached down. Surprised, I took it. “Tell Harold to call the children,” she said, then rapped my skull with her knuckling thumb.

Harvesting splinters by the inch, I slid down the hallway as Harold shouted “Arise!” to the sleeping, and “It’s time!” to the marching, until he had gathered, harried and kicked every child he could find toward the expected miracle of Daddy’s up-sitting. He even carried in the sleeping Twins, thumbs entwined for the other’s use, only to hear Mother announce Daddy’s apparent failure to reconstitute.

“The needle did not work. The black pepper did not work. The vise, the hammer, the feather...” she stated, checking each test off the list Daddy had prepared as we drew the world into our lungs and howled like hollow moons.