Horst Evans: The Maw
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
There is a mouth in my stomach. It curls its lip in contempt; it snarls at strangers. It fulfills all the functions of a normal mouth, but twisted, like it was mistranslated in creation, a slant rhyme of anatomy.
Food makes it puke, turning inputs into black tar; cold and frozen, melting through the floor. It eats thoughts, and emotions are its flavors. Boredom is bland porridge. Love is chocolate. Hopes are steaks. Wrath is five-alarm chili.
Any attempt to clean its teeth is met with a flurry of bites. They don’t fit in, they snap against each other, like tortured spaghetti sticks that scourge themselves. They fall out, rotten and corrupted, to be replaced by new ivory blades, like some sordid shark.
The tongue slumbers far back in the orifice. It looks like leather, harvested from a genetic amalgam of disease and tumors whose life could only have been short and awful. It stirs every so often, seemingly at random, irregardless of feeding. I have yet to see it do anything beyond rasp and writhe.
It is learning words, wretched words, slowly. It rarely creates utterances, except to cut to the bone. It has learned that the trauma it causes creates food for itself. Suffice to say, I have been avoiding company, but the loneliness is snacked on instead.
Eventually I will die, in body or mind it matters not, but the mouth will live on. It will feed on funereal soup, cold and simple with a boiled broth base. Then, once the mourners have moved on, it will die, starved out in a field of grass and stone.
Does it feel fear when it dies?
Can it taste it?
Horst Evans is a computer engineer from San Antonio, TX, where he lives with his partner and their cat.
