Illustration
He was upon him, flipping him on his back, straddling him where the bullet had
busted into his intestines. He yanked the Buck knife from its sheath on his belt, stuck it deep
into Clay’s mouth and worked the blade around and around and eventually out came the
tongue, a swollen thick thing with two white, stubby fibers poking out from the back. He felt
stupid suddenly, standing over Clay, holding the man’s own tongue. Clay wasn’t dead, not yet.
He blubbered and spat and flapped his arms, but the red spot on the front of his tank top grew
and soon the grass and dew were a slime of blood and he quit moving altogether.
When he gave her the tongue, at the back table at Ray’s, she took it and
wrapped it in a napkin and dropped it into her purse.
“Even if you were still alive,” she said, “You can’t lie to me
without a tongue.”
“I love you,” he said. “I really do. I just love you.”
“You fucking fuck,” she said into her purse.
“I never said that to a woman before.”
“Do you know,” she said, “he’d tell me, all the time he’d tell me,
‘I’m going to get a newspaper, I’m going to get
some cigarettes,’ and he’d be gone for days,
weeks.”
“Did you hear me, baby?” he said.
“Sure, baby. I hear you. All the way
I hear you.”
Michael Mann is a twenty-one-year-old
new British artist, residing in Yorkshire.
Michael loves to create simple pieces with
a touch of colour and a little something
different to make his work stand out.