SPEAKING IN TONGUES
Word Count: 385
What is she saying? The girl who is taking my money and giving me change. Yes, yes, Thank you and have a nice day, but there’s something else too, when we listen with our eyes. I’m just not real good at it still.
My mother and father were screamers, several decibels louder than anyone ever needed to be. Intensity, importance, all layered on top of whatever was said just by shivering the curtains a bit, or moving the walls. My sister and I would hide in the bathroom, hunkered down in the tub. We’d seen on TV how that’s where you run when there’s a tornado warning. Only we never learned to read warnings and ran when the rooms spun around.
I pass people slithering through the openings in the noon-crowded walk between banks, lunches, jobs. I’m slithering too but the wrong way it seems; those coming at me are stronger in number, more violent in their thoughts. One man dared me to touch him. One woman shrank from my accidental touch. It’s all in the eyes and I’m guessing and learning the language a blink at a time.
I caught the man’s eye just as I was pulling open the door to my office building. He turned his head but kept on walking by. He was with another man his age in conversation, nodding but arguing, the way words can let you do. I’d like to fuck you seven ways to Sunday, he said to me. I don’t think his friend caught that in their conversation. I’m not sure what I answered but I stood there with the door wide open even after he’d faced forward, falling back into place as only a piece inside the puzzle of the crowd.
All day I repeat what the man had said to me, wondering if I got it right. It sounds so familiar that after a while I wonder if I made it up in my head. In that area of brain that lurks in the frontal lobe.
That night I look at myself naked in the mirror. I stare into my eyes. I look like my father in some ways. I have his dark hair and deep-set eyes. It comes slowly, but it comes to me then. Where I’d heard the words before.
~~
Photo from Dorothee Lang’s Day 20 Cubes, a little messed with (distorted, as is life), after inspiring this piece for me today.
somehow the messy version looks less terrifying than the real mega-glass-cube-building. i keep wondering what buildings, places do to us, without word or gesture. and then your story. coming out of an office building with such a spin, and then, this turn. yes, distorted, like life.
That’s interesting; maybe roundness vs. angles adds some softness to the scene? Loved your image and it started all kinds of ideas of a reality of a normal city scene and the underlying happenings each person holds within him as he moves through it.
Wow!
I love this, intriguing and stinging… an amazing piece of writing
Thank you, Julia! There’s been some great inspiration from the Project that brings out the words and stories.
I found this very touching and intimate Susan. So many tightly woven images in a few words. Wonderful.
Thank you, Silvana. I really didn’t know myself where it was leading.