Max Booth III - We Need to Do Something

Mom scoops up her disposable razor from the counter and cracks the plastic casing against the wall, freeing the tiny blade concealed inside. “We’ll have to eat it in tiny bites,” she says, cutting into the tongue. “It’ll be tough to chew, easy to choke on, so we need to be careful.”

“You know what,” Dad says, “I’m so hungry, I don’t even think I’ll care. Another day and I’d probably take a chomp out of that creep’s dick.”

“Robert,” Mom says, “don’t be disgusting.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Bobby says, “dicks are for peeing, not eating.”

The three of us burst out laughing, then Bobby joins us, pleased with his ability to still amuse his family.

I volunteer to try the tongue first. It was my idea, after all. I’m the one who caught it. Who hunted it. The piece I choose is a small sliver of muscle. It feels gross and slippery between my fingers as I raise it to my mouth and plop it on my own tongue.

A tongue on a tongue.

This close to my face, the smell hits before the taste. I don’t stand a chance and begin gagging immediately, but force my lips shut with my palm and keep it inside my mouth, chewing fast and hard, praying for it to be over already. It tastes like old rubber and roadkill. Meanwhile, my family stares at me with utter disgust, like they don’t recognize me, and I don’t blame them. This is not me. I am not someone who rips out a stranger’s tongue, and I am certainly not someone who then eats the stranger’s tongue.

Yet here we are.

I swallow it, but keep my hand across my mouth for several seconds afterward, making sure I’m not going to puke it back up, then tell my mom to give me another piece.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

I nod furiously. Why else would I have asked for another if I wasn’t sure? “Yes. All of you. Eat. We have to eat.”

“What does it taste like?” Dad asks.

“What do you think?”

He laughs. “Goddammit, this is going to suck.”

“Eat it, Daddy!” Bobby shouts, giggling. “Eat the tongue!”

Then Dad hands him a slice of it and Bobby falls silent. “You too, buddy. Dig in.”

“Do I gotta?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t—”

“Bobby. Eat it. Now.”

Less than a minute later, he’s vomiting into the toilet.

Another thirty seconds pass, and Mom and Dad join him.

Somehow, I’m the only one who manages to keep it in my stomach. Over half of the tongue remains on the sink, which Dad picks up and hurls through the door opening. “It’s no good,” he says, moaning and clutching his gut, “no good, no good, no good…”

A day passes. Maybe several days pass. We blink a lot. We cry. We piss and shit while avoiding eye contact. I think we sleep. My eyes burn. Every muscle aches. A gnawing throb digs into my cranium any time I try to process complex thoughts. I’m so hungry I can’t stand it. I would kill for another tongue. I would eat tongues every day if I could.

Tongues. This whole thing started with a tongue, didn’t it? Not just one, either. Of course not. A world plagued by tongues, flapping like meaty perpetual motion machines. First with Amy’s tongue, inside my mouth, then my own, inside hers, both of our tongues swirling together in a forbidden dance. The best dance. One I prayed would last forever. And maybe, if it’d ended there, we’d be okay, we wouldn’t be trapped in this goddamn bathroom, the world wouldn’t be ending. But what happened?

“You know what happened,” Amy says, not inside my head but inside the bathroom again. We’re lying together in the tub, face-to-face, limbs wrapped around each other like we’re one being, one creation. An aerial viewer would find it impossible to determine where one of us began and the other ended. Her breath smells rancid but I don’t care. If worms burst from her mouth I would greedily slurp them down my own throat and ask for seconds. Nothing that belonged to her would ever be repulsive in my eyes. Anything less would make her somebody else. Anything less and she wouldn’t be the girl I loved.

The girl I love.

“You know exactly what happened,” she says again, voice low enough not to draw attention from the rest of my family. They’re all asleep, anyway, snores rasping out of them like death rattles. Soon the noises will be the real deal and Amy and I will be able to speak as loud as we want. Soon nothing will matter.

“Joe,” I whisper. Uttering the name aloud is enough to make me gag. Joe, Joe, Joe … you little shit. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t ruined everything. “He caught us, at school.”

Amy nods. “My hand was down your pants… and that fuckin’ automatic flusher kept going off…”

We share a little giggle.

“What was he even doing in the girls’ bathroom?”

“Following me.” Amy hesitates. “I think he was already suspicious.”

“He loved you.”

“Was obsessed with me.”

“Used to follow you in the halls, try sitting next to you in class. It was creepy.”

“Remember the notes he’d leave on my desk?”

“Why wouldn’t he just take the hint? Why couldn’t he understand you weren’t interested?”

“It didn’t matter what I felt,” she says. “Guys like Joe—once they want something, they won’t rest until they have it.”

Joe was a loner. He had fewer friends than I did. Not because he was weird or a nerd or anything like that. Simply put, Joe was an asshole. Everybody saw through him. The kinda guy who thought he was better than anybody, and wasn’t shy about letting it be known. Nobody wanted to hang out with him because his presence was unbearable. Of course, from his perspective it was everybody else who were the assholes. Nobody understood his genius. Fucking whatever. Joe sucked and we all knew it.

“In retrospect,” Amy says, “we shouldn’t have been surprised at what he did. It was a total Joe thing for him to do.”

“No.” I shake my head and hold her tighter, wanting to tell her there was no excuse for his actions but struggling to form the right words.

She smiles and kisses my cheek. “You don’t need to say anything. Anything you think, I think.”

“How?” I ask. So tired. So very tired.

“We are one.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“No one’s asking you to.”

“When the video started spreading at school, and I saw you were in it, and I saw what you were doing, I knew right away it wasn’t you. I knew he had done something to make it look like you. I ran through the school wanting to kill him.”

“Would you have, if you’d caught him?” Amy asks.

“Kind of a dumb question now, don’t you think?”

“How did you know it wasn’t me?”

“What?”

“You said you knew right away. How?”

“Easy,” I tell her. “The girl in the video, she was naked.”

“Yes…?”

“She didn’t have any scars.”

“Oh.”

I’d never heard of deepfakes until Amy explained them to me after everything calmed down. Basically, you take dozens (or hundreds) of photos of someone’s head, upload them into an algorithm for like twenty-four straight hours, then you’re able to replace the head of a person in a pre-existing video with the head you uploaded. Internet dickheads do it a lot to troll people they hate. Make it look like their “enemies” are having sex on camera. “Revenge porn is big with these nerds,” she told me after school that day. I’d come running to her house in tears and she’d met me at the front door, took me around back to the tire swing behind their garage.

“That’s what this is?” I asked her. “Revenge porn?”

And she nodded. “He uploaded it on all the major sites. Emailed everybody at school. They think it’s me.”