They cut the tongues out quickly, cleanly, like a wire through wet clay. It is an act of mercy to make it so neat, so swift. They give the girls pain pills or put them to sleep if they fight. The pharmacists jokingly call themselves the bartenders. “I’ll fix you up a cocktail nice and strong.” When the girls come to, they are released—wild animals let back into the world. Quick and painless, the politicians say, a fair punishment. But we know better.
There is nothing painless about cutting a tongue out of a body, nothing quick about the rest of their lives. The pain is remembered. It comes back to them in the stubs of their tongues, a burning blue fire that licks behind their eyes. Even the healing is bitterly slow. Every movement of their tongue is like fiberglass: invisible and penetrating and enduring. They must sit with the shock of their pain, a seared knife, until it dulls into a bubbled stub of candle wax. This is how they learn to keep their mouths closed, to cradle their pink stumps at the backs of their throats. This is how they are reminded their body is not theirs—never was—by taking part of it away.
This is what we know from our aunts, sisters, cousins, friends who’ve been punished this way. Their stories are stains in their throats. But this is not what we see. It would be “inappropriate.” What we watch on TV is the before: girls behind the stand, pale as seafoam, their words being twisted up into a fist. Tongue-tied.
*
On the TV, we watch another trial, watch the court find another girl guilty. The prosecution, a boy—maybe eighteen or nineteen—wears a ballcap and a black eye. “She fought,” he says. “She fought me when I tried to kiss her and said no when I lifted her skirt.”
“Is this true?” the prosecutor asks the girl. “Did you disrespect him? Were you violent?” He asks this because consent is a requirement. A woman’s obligation. In the courtroom the girl’s body shakes, but her head does not. She says nothing as if she is already preparing for what is to come. Her words have already betrayed her, nothing more can be done. The jury will convene; tomorrow at noon, they will cut out her tongue.
We watch this trial at the diner, huddled together around the old TV perched on the wall. We should be working, filling up sweet teas and taking orders, but no one moves for this. The diners do not look up from their sunny side up eggs except for a few mothers who have tucked their little ones away, and a few fathers who have turned their daughters towards the screen, their young faces the color of raw dough. “Don’t let this be you.”
The trials are nothing new, but they always come with a sick feeling. Every month, accused girls are collected from their homes to go to trial. These are the girls who’ve refused to consent. Who’ve shoved and kicked and screamed at good college-bound boys. Boys with football scholarships and great smiles.
The trial plays over the lunchtime lull between the afternoon and 5 o’clock news. It is the time slot that usually plays soaps and reruns of old sitcoms. We like the soaps best because they take us somewhere. Somewhere with overcomplicated plots and evil twins and passionate affairs. In the soaps, if someone dies, they just come back to life in the season finale or have a brain transfer into another body. In the soaps, nothing is irreversible, not even death. The trials take us somewhere too, but it’s nowhere we want to go.
Doc, our fry cook, doesn’t let us change the channel, says he likes to know what’s happening—the weekend’s weather forecast, a traffic jam on I-70, a local kid who received a basketball scholarship to the state school an hour away. He says just like anything else, these trials are current events.
We think, too, that he watches for the same reason we do, to see if someone he knows is on. Once, it was one of us, a waitress who went to trial. She was so ungodly young. It was a bitter drink, that trial, and it killed a bit of every one of us. Some of us remember how her hair stuck to her face and others how she shook at the stand. The ones of us who were already mothers looked away.
But even if we know no one—as is often the case—it’s no less painful. We carry the weight of the girls—their tears, their mothers’ tears—in our breast pockets through the rest of our shift as we clear out tables and welcome new diners to their booths. Even long after the trials have wrapped up, their cries continue. It is a wonder no one hears them but us.
*
At the diner it’s breakfast all day. We serve flapjacks with strawberry syrup, steaming platters of eggs, strips of grease-soaked bacon, and biscuits so fluffy that they bake up and over like little leaning towers. We serve families, keep a kiddy area stocked with toys and coloring books for children to play with while they wait. We serve truck drivers and Boy Scouts, the Sunday after-church crowd, and college kids on road trips. We also have regulars like the family with the little twin boys who always get pancakes with chocolate chips in the shape of eyes and a smile, a dollop of whipped cream for a nose.
We wear matching outfits: starched-white aprons and soft blue dresses underneath. Kitten heels in black. Some of us wear pearls, some of us go bare. We all wear wedding rings, even the few of us who are secretly single. This is a wives-only diner and Doc could have the single ones arrested if he turned them in. But he won’t because he doesn’t care enough to ask the right questions.
*
Today, we serve mainly families. It is a federal holiday and people celebrate with an extra helping of buttered toast or banana pancakes. We wait on the regulars with the twin little boys still tubby from their babyhood. They stuff pancakes into their mouths and the father dabs syrup from their rosy cheeks.
In a booth by the front door another family is just forming. The mother holds her belly and her face is tight in the same way, as if invisible hands are pulling back her hair, her skin. Her husband orders for the both of them: coffee and fresh pressed orange juice and two egg platters, with all the toast and bacon on his plate, and all the eggs on hers. Every time we walk by, the husband is chatting but the wife says nothing. We shift our eyes just so as to not draw attention to ourselves and they are always in the same position: his eyes on her, hers at her bump or gently returning his gaze.
It is Molly, the oldest of us and therefore naturally the gossip, who bursts through the Ladies’ Room door—a single-stall bathroom we get to ourselves—to tell us. Breathless, as if she has run a much farther distance, she pants out the words. “She’s lost her tongue.”
That’s how we say it, as if the woman has merely misplaced it. Such a silly woman, she’s lost her hat, her keys, her tongue! There is no audible gasp between us, we say nothing, and let the weight of our wordlessness settle onto our shoulders. Together, in a joint breath we whisper, “She’s a mermaid.”
Between us waitresses, that is what we call the girls who’ve lost their tongues. Mermaids. We call them mermaids because each step they take is painful, because they walk like they are in the wrong world. Because we remember the waitress who was a singer, or wanted to be, before they cut out her tongue just like in that old story. Because they die alone like the mermaid turned to seafoam. No one wants to marry a dirty mermaid.
But here is this mermaid whose hand is being caressed by a man and whose other rests on top of a bump. A baby! We whisper in clusters throughout our shift, asking who could she be to find security after such a sentence? Were they lovers before? Why would he stay? We cannot ask her and would never ask him. We agree she is beautiful but has a hazy air. She is pale with thin black hair and purple craters under her eyes. Her skin has a silver quality like she is missing a crucial nutrient. “Singing,” we agree, nodding our heads vigorously. “Or taste,” one of us adds. “Oh yes,” we concur. More vigorous nods.
Doc turns the TV up for the next trial. An angry defendant claims a girl scratched him when he approached her, shouted “get off me, [BEEP].” We don’t know what she must have said, but we know if it is censored, they will find it cause for punishment. Two of our regulars, the parents of the twin little boys, shake their heads in unison. Their eyes tsk the poor future mermaid. We know they must think she is a fool. “Just follow the rules,” the woman says as she slides a bacon strip into the tiny hole of her mouth.
The woman, like us, is a lucky one. She has a tongue and a husband and a wedding band that keeps her only for him. But we roll our eyes because she has forgotten, so soon, the hands that used to chase us at night if we ever stepped out alone for a smoke or fresh air. She has forgotten the cars that followed behind us as we drove home from high school or the nice boys at the party that, once alone, pushed us up against the walls while they drunkenly fumbled belt buckles. She is too old to remember but too young to have a daughter of age. “She must live in a tranquil delirium,” we say. How dangerous to be a woman who has forgotten. We watch her two little boys make laser noises as they aim their forks at each other. We hope she never has a daughter.
The pregnant mermaid does not look at the TV. She only looks at the food she has barely touched. The man across from her whispers to her rapidly. The more he speaks, the more she wilts and the more agitated he becomes. “Ma’am,” he says to Anne Marie when she walks by. “Ma’am, could you please change the channel?”
Anne Marie stares at him wide-eyed. No one has ever asked for the channel to change. We do not even know if Doc would allow it. “What would you like to change it to?” she asks, but the man says, “Anything else. Anything at all.”
Doc is surprised by the request and we see the angry bark bulge up his throat, but it catches in his mouth. If it were one of us, he would yell. But it is a customer asking, a man. He swallows hard and flips to Channel 3. Soccer is on. The mermaid exhales. Her husband kisses her knuckles.
For the first time, we watch soccer instead.
*
When the day is over and the dinner shift comes to relieve us, we slip away to our respective cars, to our respective houses and spouses and pets and children and kiss each on the cheek like a choreographed dance. In the winters, we make Hamburger Helper, or baked ziti, or serve a pork butt we left in the slow cooker all day. In the summers, we serve a salad with lemonade for the kids, a beer for our husbands, Lipton for us. We might watch TV, read a book, go for a walk if it’s still light out. Every few weeks we will get a call from our aunt, sister, cousin, friend who is in hysterics because her aunt, sister, cousin or friend is going to trial—said no when she should have stayed silent—and we will comfort and coo and let them cry through the small metal speaker that connects us to their voice. And every so often, it will be our sister, cousin, friend who calls to tell us that it was them this time. Then they will either tell us that they said no, and we will crumple to the floor as we wait to hear their trial date; or they will confess that they let a man do what he wanted, and they will cry softly, so softly, so that only we hear them.
We will call to check in and wait up for calls back, but the phone will stay silent, and we will wonder if keeping one’s tongue really stops the silencing from happening after all. Then we will cry a little, or bake a midnight cake, or pay bills, or make love to our spouse and think about how it could all be different if we weren’t protected by diamond rings and paperwork. Permitted to keep our legs together or open them as we please as long as it is with our husband and, of course, on his terms. Things are always consensual in marriage. It’s in the paperwork.
*
The mermaid and her husband don’t return again on a trial day, but they come often on other days. Become regulars. Over the weeks, we get cozy with them. We ask about the gender. “We don’t know yet but should find out soon!” Or if they have any baby names picked out. “A few but nothing decided.” The husband answers, of course. He talks chipper like any other husband might, but it surprises us each time, how bright he is when his wife returns his smile or when she holds his hands in hers. Perhaps he too is surprised to see a mermaid smile.
He chats us up with the energy of a wind-up doll, all animated gestures and a voice so loud it’s like he is speaking for three. We learn that the husband’s favorite meal is breakfast and he likes coming here in the afternoons for seconds. We learn they like their coffee with cream and one sugar. We learn they often need extra napkins and always a to-go box for the mermaid’s eggs. We learn that the husband works in construction but that there is no work right now. We learn that they are only here for the pregnancy, staying with the husband’s family to save some money and have some extra helping hands. We learn that the husband talks to the mermaid with a gusto that never burns out. He talks and talks as if she is talking back.
Each week the mermaid’s belly looks rounder, fuller. We try to make her feel welcome. We smile when we pass her booth, offer a glass of sweet tea or orange juice. It feels silly to offer these things, to place them before her and nod, knowing she cannot verbally accept or refuse. Knowing, too, that these are things she cannot truly enjoy. It is all we have to offer.
The mermaid’s belly continues to fill despite hardly touching her food or our meager gifts. She looks fainter, we agree, like the baby is swallowing everything inside. We ask about the gender again when we know the mermaid is far enough along to know the answer. The husband smiles, softer this time and reaches for the mermaid’s hand. “We still don’t know yet.” He says this slowly, like he is trying the words out. Not at all like his usual self. The mermaid squeezes his hand back, but her face cinches in something like pain. Her eyes are gray, and her skin is the color of an old bone. Her fingernails are raw where they’ve been bitten down to the stubs.
In the Ladies’ Room, we eat misshapen pancakes and gossip. One of us says the baby sits low on her stomach so it must be a boy, but Molly clicks her tongue. “That baby will be a girl. Mark my words.” When we ask why she shakes her head. “Baby girls steal up their mother’s health and beauty. Don’t you know that? And just look at her.” Molly points a stocky finger towards her booth. “That woman looks more like a wafer every day.”
Anne Marie nods solemnly. “It has to be a girl. You all saw her. When I was pregnant with my daughter I thought it might kill me.” We know Anne Marie doesn’t mean it like Molly means it. We were there for Anne Marie’s pregnancy when she cried every day for her baby, when she slumped into the diner sleepless and gaunt, taunted by nightmares about her unborn daughter’s tongue.
We continue to bicker among ourselves, even when the couple is not in the diner. It takes over our conversations, our obsession swelling. Some days she seems to take up the whole diner, crammed into every corner of our conversations. On a trial day, we spend the whole afternoon with our backs to the TV, clucking on about old onesies and booties we ought to give them. We talk so vivaciously, so ferociously about our own pregnancy memories that we don’t even notice the trials.
This is a lie. They still intrude. But it is better to think of our mermaid, instead. A mermaid making a life.
*
On a day the couple is absent, Anne Marie comes in crying. Her daughter is going to trial. Just a young girl. Barely eighteen. We try our best to console her in the only way we know how, with hugs and pats and a fresh slice of coconut cake, but of course there is nothing we can do. Our touches are dust at her feet. We cover her shifts, and she curls up in the Ladies’ Room holding the hand of whichever of us has slipped away to be with her.
We take our lunch breaks in shifts so that someone is with her all day. When we go to her, we curve our bodies around her shoulders like we would our mother, our sister, our daughter. She is shivering and silent. We sit with her like this, cold and quiet, the colorful strings tied to the AC unit blowing too hard on her face, the boxes of hamburger buns and ketchup bottles crammed into the overflow pantry. None of us can know what she is thinking and when she looks at her knees or hands or feet, we are certain she doesn’t see them. We knead her shoulders with our fingers, move them down her arms. We want to work the heat of our bodies into hers. Stop the shivering.
To each of us, she lets out a coughing, tearful sigh. To each of us she says, “Is it awful that part of me is happy?” She doesn’t look at any of us. Only her knees, hands, feet. “It didn’t happen. She scratched his eye. It’s still swollen shut. But she got away. They are going to do horrible things to her but—” the words come rapidly like a purge.
Each time she tells one of us, she wheezes. Each time she wheezes, we hand her a tissue. “She got away. He didn’t fucking touch her. Thank God.” We brush our fingers through her hair. We offer her another tissue. “If she had let him—God. Thank God.” Those of us with daughters think of them, their pigtails and soft edges, their pink tongues licking ice cream cones in the summertime. Those of us without daughters hold our stomachs tight. There is no one we can think to thank for this.
“I’m not going to let them do it to her. People have escaped, you know. It has happened before.” This is not untrue. We know of once, twice. Not enough. We stare at her, cock our heads, tilt our chins. She stares back, unrelenting, as if we are the ones stopping her.
There is nowhere they can escape to, really. Any of us. But how do you say that to the mother of a mermaid-to-be? When our lunch breaks end, we return to the slow murmur of the diner. We return to the trials Doc has turned back on. During the verdict of each one, we all hold our breath like we do each time, as if this could be the one that breaks the chain. Then we exhale, heavy, and get back to work.
Within the week, Anne Marie is gone. Her daughter is, too, and so is the family car. Her husband was away on a business trip and by the time anyone noticed it had been days. “Sure, she had missed some shifts at the diner, but none of us thought anything of it. She never said anything to us,” we tell police, then reporters. “We just assumed she needed time. But no one is surprised.” Instead, we smile real smiles to our customers and give extra dollops of whipped cream on pancakes. We let ourselves be just a little bit hopeful.
The couple is here the day the reporters come, and when they arrive, they seem startled. This place, often so quiet in the late afternoon, is now frenzied with cameras, mics, and people wearing too much concealer. The husband asks one of us what has happened, and she tells him all about Anne Marie and her girl on the run. “They won’t make it far, though. No one ever does.” We don’t know why she says it, except that it is what we are all thinking. But still, to say it is to breathe faith into it. The mermaid looks like she is going to be sick. Her skin is even slicker today, cloudier. She rushes outside to the parking lot, holding a hand over her mouth. We look away even though she runs out of sight.
The next week, the couple does not come back. We keep an eye out for them all afternoon and when they don’t come, we are sure the mermaid must be going into labor. We wait, intent on them to show—the happy family. We wait and serve steaming platters of pancakes and watch the trials only because we half expect to see Anne Marie’s girl. But it is never her.
The next week, the couple does not show. Nor the week after. We do not see them for a month, then months. No one will say it, but we suspect they are gone. It feels foolish now, that we expected to see the baby. Or at least a photo. Discussion of the family slows until they are only brought up sporadically like the shards of a forgotten dream. And then, one day, we see our mermaid on TV. It’s in the 5 o’clock news after another trial.
It’s just a photo of our mermaid but it’s enough. She looks old, twice as old as before and her skin has only gained a grayer sheen. She stares straight at us. Her baby appears in a video just briefly, small as a moonbeam in the arms of the husband. She gurgles and coos. A girl. Her mother was caught holding her under the river’s surface and now she is behind bars. There will be another trial for her, but she is mute and will not be able to defend herself. We all know, though, that it doesn’t really matter. Words could not change a thing.
When the dinner shift relieves us, we go home to our houses, spouses, children and pets. We kiss everyone on the cheek. We cook dinner. We go on living. We go on wondering how the woman could do that to her daughter, and for at least a moment, we wonder if it is fair to our own baby girls that we never tried. But then we think of Anne Marie and her little girl. Imagine them sipping a shared cup of coffee. Eating gas station peanuts and packaged hard-boiled eggs. Singing. And Anne Marie’s voice repeats: God. Thank God.
Emily Lowe is a Brooklyn-based writer who explores queerness, womanhood, and the body across her writing. She is a graduate of UNCW's MFA program where she taught creative writing and worked as fiction editor for Ecotone Magazine. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Moon City Review, River Teeth, HAD Lit and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a memoir and short story collection inspired by fairy tales.
Photo by Josh Hild