dirt mouth

liar liar liar

Nothing happens here. Not to him. Not to me.

It was 1:57 AM when I went back to the trailer he used to share with his Pa. He was on the couch, folded into himself like a hung carcass, his knees pressed up so hard I thought his ribs might crack. His breathing stuttered. Little hiccups, like something bubbling up through a shower drain. Not quite air, not quite fluid. A dog drowning, perhaps.

Once when I was a kid, a car ran over my foot and kept going. The tread left a lattice of black rubber marks across the skin, gravel jammed in. I didn’t clean it. I pressed the wound between my fingers, just to see the pus rise up like tidewater around the stones. On my Ma’s old MacBook I googled “infection” and it showed me something that looked just like it. Bright red edges. Sick yellow bloom. Beautiful, really. How could something festering feel so intimate? So right?

I told people I was limping ‘cause I got into a fight. No one cared. Or if they did, they didn’t bother making a face about it. I still limp sometimes—fall to rise, just to remember I can. Sometimes I make it worse on purpose, drag the foot a little and wince. When I met him, he went home with me that night out of interest for my limp. I would tell him the story of how I got it whenever I could. I wanted him badly, but all I had were old memories, and if that would keep him then I would tell him again and again.

Maybe there was something stitched into my flesh. And maybe he saw it before I did. Or maybe he just liked pretending he could. Either way, it happened.

The wallpaper reminded me of that lattice. Repeating florals, too precise to be beautiful. The corners had started to lift where the glue lost interest. I touched it as I passed. Thought about peeling it off in strips, rolling it between my fingers like dead skin after a burn. Maybe wrapping myself in it. Gauze. A mummy with no tomb.

I stepped past him into the kitchen. Left my bag on the counter. The air was thick and sour—bleach clinging to mildew, something cooked days ago still hanging in the corners. I opened the window. The factories were burning again. Smoke climbed the dark like it had hands. Pressed flat against the sky like it could hold the stars in place.

Inside the fridge: a single package of chicken thighs. Four of them. Salmon-coloured and sweating in plastic. They looked like two lovers curled in post-coital rigour mortis. I didn’t touch it. Lately my thoughts come apart too easy. Some don’t even feel like mine. They circle back in his voice, stories he told first. Last week I wrote one down. My boyfriend laughed when he read it. Kissed me after, like that might pull the bitterness out of my chest. It didn’t.

There was a kind of prayer in the way he remembered things. And every time he remembered them, something shifted. Like how his Ma’s name had an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’. Like how the gun had only one bullet, not two, and still she dropped on the first shot outside the store. She was carrying thighs for Thanksgiving. The meat hit the ground first. It split and spilled around her. Pink, like dog food. He said that. I believed him.

He always told it with his eyes closed, like he was watching it play out inside the skin of his lids. Next time he told it, there hadn’t been any bullet at all, just the falling. He said the sky was on fire but only because he’d left the stove on. He held those stories tight, something heavy in the base of his palm. I let him fuck me after, because he told me things my boyfriend wouldn’t even admit to dreaming.

Once, when he found out I lied about my Ma being dead, he didn’t yell. He just looked at me, said the lies I told were growing roots behind the trailer. Real ones. Said they'd twist around my ankle and drag me somewhere mean. Somewhere that didn’t know how to let you go. I laughed because I didn’t understand, and he didn’t talk to me for a week. After that, the weeds looked different. Like they were leaning in to listen. The grass scratched at our calves like it was trying to remind us of something.

I stepped out again, back through the loose-hinged door and into the patch of dirt we called a yard. Crabgrass clung to the steps. Fire ants curled their red knuckles in soft mounds. My fingers smelled like rust and basil. Leftovers from something I couldn’t remember. Pebbles still pressed into my knees from the summer I fell off his mountain bike. He told me to leave them. Said it’d hurt worse if I tried to dig them out. I believed him. Pain made more sense when it lingered. In the grass, something moved. Slow, deliberate, a breath someone gave up on halfway through. I bent down. It was just a bird, but its wings were folded wrong, like they’d been stitched that way. Like they were never meant to fly. Only to hang.

Past the crabgrass, the tailgate waited. The old pickup was flaking rust like sunburnt skin, and his Pa was out there shirtless again, ribs sticking out like broken picket fences. He was always counting something. Minutes, smokes, hours ‘til he could pay for getting his dick wet. I wondered if his ribs were collapsing inward, breaking. I kissed him once. Soft. Right on the mouth. Not for sex. Not even for comfort. It felt more like a mercy, like how you lay palms on the dying. His tits were soft like a baby’s and he smelled like ash and wet belts. He didn’t stir. I told myself he was dreaming, a bourbon coma pooling under his belly like an infant curling for milk. I didn’t check. Thought maybe it was rude to. Death had been written into his mornings so many times, it felt like we were only tracing the lines when it finally happened.

When I told him, he called it mercy. Said I sent his Pa up like smoke to find his Ma in the churchyard sky. Said I married their ghosts, stitched them together like bones laid clean in a mausoleum. Said he’d seen it in a dream where the dirt peeled back easy and the dead were willing. I told him it was an accident. But the truth is, I always aim best when I’m not looking. He kissed me slow, lips slack, spit sliding warm onto our toes. Said I had god in my hands. I thought I saw grit in the saliva. Pebbles hitting my bare feet. I think I was dreaming.

Back inside, he had woken. He stood in the threshold between the kitchen and living room, hair stuck to his forehead, bare feet blackened from the floor. Concave stomach. The light made a play of his shadow. He didn’t speak. Just crossed the room and folded into me, head heavy in my lap. A child too big for comfort.

He whispered Ma and my fingers went still as stone. I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. He was probably still half-under, tangled in that velvet seam between dream and consciousness. Somewhere out back, the dog was chewing something. I didn’t want to know what. I watched the crabgrass shiver. I could feel his heart beating through the thin skin of his back, too fast, like a cockroach caught underneath a cup. The dog barked once. Then the trailer groaned in its joints. An old man rising for the last time.

I got him into bed. He curled like larva, one hand wedged under the pillow. His lips kept moving in sleep. Ma or maybe just mouthing air. The bird was still outside. Still folded wrong. I went back, bare feet in the dirt, picked it up. Its body was too warm, something recently loved or barely dead. I brought it in. Hung it from the ceiling on a thread of fishing line, right above his bed. The fan stirred it slow. Wingbones twitching. A quiet orbit.

Outside, dawn blew its sour breath across the dirt. The sky wasn’t burning anymore. It was swelling, slow, like a bruise. Blue, then grey, then just dumb nothing. I thought about running. Into the flatwoods. Into the piss-warm underbrush and whatever waited past the edge of the trailer park. I imagined the sweat. How it’d cling. My hair like seaweed across my cheeks. My bones softening into milk. One fall and I’d stay down. Not because it hurt. Just because getting up felt stupid.

By 8:00 AM, the cops had already come and gone. The day I kissed his Pa and he didn’t wake, they said there was a hole in his chest. It was hidden under blankets thick enough to smother Florida heat. I remember thinking, oh. That’s where my prayers went. I didn’t ask about the gun. Didn’t care. What disappointed me most was that it wasn’t the kiss that did it. I wanted it to be my kiss, not the hole in his chest. I wanted my mouth to be a weapon. I wanted him to be right. Maybe I had siphoned his Pa’s last breath and held it in my gut until I started to feel pregnant. I wanted it so bad I started thinking about what his gold-plated teeth might be worth at a pawn shop. Something to hold. Something to cash.

Now the trailer smelled like bleach and the memory of bleach. He sat at the table in his underwear, elbows on formica. He dropped the bullet into my palm. Warm from his skin, heavier than it looked. Then he folded my fingers around it—slow, gentle—like he was giving me a pet to care for. I closed my hand over his, the way you cup a moth you’re not sure you want to kill.

He said, “It won’t get us anything.”

“We could sell the teeth,” I told him. I smiled when I said it. He didn’t. Just stared at my mouth. Like maybe if he looked long enough, the words would unsay themselves. He told me I had something in my teeth, instead. My toes curled on the linoleum. Sticky, buzzing with something dead under it. Ten worms curling in their sleep before a storm splits the soil.

We went to the pawn shop anyway. The guy behind the counter looked like something left too long in a jar. A face meant for a David Lynch scene: sagged in the cheeks, lidless in the eyes, already brined in a loneliness that predated us. He said no to the bullet. Wanted the pistol. We didn’t have it. On the way out, I stole a ring without thinking. Cheap, brass leaking green. I liked how it marked me. I was being held too tight by something else that didn’t want me either.

Back at the trailer he stood in the yard and smoked by the tailgate. The dog dug at something soft in the dirt. The bird kept turning inside.

I showered. The water came out thin, almost apologetic, the colour of runoff after a storm. It trailed down my body like it was ashamed to touch me. I watched it soak the film of dirt off my legs. The mirror in here was oval, shaped like a mouth mid-sigh. In its breath, I looked almost alive. The kind of healthy you only get from being too far from home for too long. Then the humidity rose like a curtain and I disappeared from myself.

At noon he said he had to clock in at Wendy’s. He didn’t move. Just pressed the back of his hand to my stomach as if it might hatch something warm. We lay there on the bed in a stillness so stale it started to smell. The ceiling sweated with ghost stains, old leaks. He stared at them and said, “I could start over. I could go west. Alabama, Mississippi, Texas.” He said the names like actors, like sports teams.

“Every mile will drag you back,” I said. “The longer you imagine running the more the map will turn into a body.” He liked when I talked like that. He didn’t know I was only repeating him, the way I always do. I was the kid who enjoyed playing telephone in the church basement. It’s always been like that. Me, repeating. Him, pretending not to hear it. I just didn’t want him to leave. Because every time he spoke about going, it was always I. Never we. Never us. I hoped mimicry was what forged intimacy, but I also feared it.

We didn’t eat all day. Just ice and cheek meat. The dog slept in the yellow corner where the linoleum had curled. He told the stories again. Then the part he added sometimes: how he knew it was coming.

He knew the kind of stories that made me spread my legs, dimes rolling out of my pussy on two legs for every word he spoke, for every piece of prose he divulged. I spent the afternoon, hoping. And then, praying. And then, wondering why I haven’t gone home to my boyfriend in a week.

In the evening, the sun sat on the trailer like a fat cat. He took my hand and he showed me the little grave he’d dug for something the dog found. We buried something he wouldn’t name in the yard. A squirrel, a secret, a piece of his Pa. He patted the mound like a baby’s back. I imagined it was me under there. Just to see if he’d cry. Or dig me up. When I closed my eyes to watch the scene play out, I saw nothing at all. The kind of stupid nothing you see when you fall into a dreamless sleep.

We drank later. Gas station beer. I got the cheap stuff that tasted good enough if you focused on how miserable you are. We sat on the steps and studied the flatwoods. After a while he laughed, inebriated. From beer, loss, or sadness. Motioned towards the bed.

We fucked to the sound of birds thudding on the tin roof. Thump. Thump. One of them still alive, screaming in bird-language. Saying: get out. Or maybe: this is where you’re meant to be.

When he finished, he wiped his nose on my thigh and fell back asleep. His breath in fits, his snot drying on my skin. I laid beside him, itchy, bored, waiting for the next bird to fall. I thought about the ring in my pocket and the bullet in my other pocket and wondered which would leave the greener mark if I rubbed hard enough.

Around 3:00 AM the factories shut down like clockwork. The bird above us had stopped turning. The fan clicked weakly with each pass. He rolled toward me and put the hidden hand between my knees. It was reminiscent of childhood and habit. I moved his hand to my sternum. He let it sit there, heavy as a rock, as something he’ll never say to me.

That’s when I figured, fine, I loved him. Though it felt about the same as a hangover.

Morning came in cheap and blue. The dog scratched at his balls. The fridge hummed loudly. I went outside and smoked one of his cigarettes and didn’t inhale, just watched the smoke go up and up and up, until it hit nothing and gave up.

Nothing happened, and my gums burned. Throbbed. I tongued the inside of my cheek and spat out a stone. Then another. Then five. Until my mouth was quarry, gums nothing but wet dirt.

The car accident wasn’t real. I know that now. It was Sarah and Kathy, their hands on the back of my head, pushing me into the ground. My lips in the soil, my teeth grinding rock. Until my skin and the dirt felt like the same thing.

They had a name for me.

Dirt mouth. Dirt mouth. Dirt mouth.

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sorry it took so long, i was unsure of where to take this piece. as always, thank you Virgins for reading. and special thanks to nico durán for reading the first draft.