Lucky Star

-Lucky Star-
by ali shaw

I wished upon a lucky star and a demon appeared on the window sill. It
was not what I had been expecting.

'Umm?hello,' I said, 'How can I help you?'

Earlier that evening I had received two phone calls and one visit from
various friends, and the conversations we had embarked upon had been
sickening. Sickening because of the way that my voice grated, and
slipped between pitch and pitch like the sound of a cleaner's cloth
squeaking back and forth across a window. It was hard to follow the
ongoing thoughts and words of my friends, preoccupied as I was by the
hideous whinging that limped out of my mouth. That made our dialogue
full of false starts and awkward pauses, until each friend hung up, or
left.

Alone, and cursing my vocal ineptitude, I stamped up to my darkening
bedroom, and sat with the light off and the curtains open, watching the
stars come out. I am not a superstitious man, and the last time that I
checked, I was a Cancer, so I decided that I would pick a lucky star
from that constellation. It took me a while to pinpoint the appropriate
bright set of dots in the sky, but I finally managed with the help of
an astronomy manual that my brother (who is far more intelligent about
such things than I am) gave me for my birthday. The Crab proved to be
especially dim, a fact I took as symbolic, and the star I picked, the
brightest star, was referred to, (again, unspectacularly) as Beta
Cancer. This was my lucky star.

Gazing heavenward, sighing, throwing caution to the winds, I made my
wish. I had seen Disney's Snow White two days before, with my
nephew.

There was a fizz of purple smoke, glittering briefly with silver
flashes. As the tiny cloud cleared, the demon was left sat there on the
window sill. He looked like a fish.

'Umm?hello,' I ventured, 'How can I help you?'

The demon had no arms and legs, and no mouth or eyes that I could spot.
It was a wet pink colour, dappled here and there with shades of grey.
Where its voice came from I cannot say, but it flapped as it spoke,
like a mackerel slung onto a dry deck. In fact, it was about as
fearsome as a mackerel.

'It is I who am here to help you!' it proclaimed, in a voice as
beautiful as any nymph or dryad's could ever be, a voice with a texture
like peat, and a lingering note behind each word, like the strong
aftertaste of a royal liqueur. It was a voice that one would beg for a
song, and pester for encore after encore.

'What do you mean?' I enquired, off-put by the sight, but charmed by
the sound.
'That ours is a bargain to be made!' it said, twitching into various
arcs. 'I have a voice with no body, you have flesh with no
voice.'
That much was true. I asked what it proposed, and soon rushed into the
study, excitedly dragging open the stationary drawer, and returning to
the demon's window sill with a large, glinting pair, of steel
scissors.

I had a jar of pickled onions brooding in a kitchen cupboard, so I
shoved my tongue into the acid with them when I had hacked it out of my
throat. Then, with a shaking glee, I lifted the pink little demon (it
was wet to the touch) and pushed it between my grinning jaws, folding
my lips closed over it. I flicked the light on, and shuffled in front
of the mirror. Then I opened wide.

The demon had perfectly replaced my former mouth-muscle, and sat,
amongst no blood, and no evidence of the night's earlier, violent
surgery, as if it had been there ever since I was born. 'Irascible
man!' it cackled, 'Together, we will accomplish much malice!' My ears
tingled with the delight of hearing my new voice, as if milk and honey
were flowing through their canals.

I wanted to ask the demon what its name was, and whether it was a boy
or a girl, but found that, since I no longer possessed a tongue of my
own, I was incapable. At first this did not seem so unpleasant, for I
had a charmer in my mouth to do my talking for me. Eventually, I wrote
my questions on the corner of the newspaper, beneath the
crossword.

'Penemue,' it said, and informed me that it was gender-less, as are all
demons - being by very nature created, not conceived. It also explained
that this difference between humans and demons was cause for the
greatest jealousy, because demons and angels were incapable of finding
physical solace in fellow demons. 'However,' said Penemue, 'You shall
refer to me as masculine from here on in.'

The demon slept well that night, but kept me awake with its
self-indulgent snoring.

Soon after, came the girls. Without wanting to state the obvious, I
should have to describe the process as supernatural. Quite how he did
it I can never know, but that some sort of demonic foul play was
involved seemed almost inevitable. He talked me into exercising at the
gym, 'fighting the flab,' so that I could don tight shirts and trousers
and blend seamlessly with the sweaty male crowd of seedy night club
dance floors. Once he had driven me to such locations, it took only a
sprinkling of choice verbal morsels, and all manner of nubile young
women were fastened to my lips, their tongues wiggling about with the
lustful Penemue, while I amused myself at first with groping, and then
wondered what all the fuss had been about in the first place, and
wondered at the physics that enabled some of the things that occurred
in the cavity of my mouth to truly do so.

The demon used to tell me all about it on the following afternoons,
when the hypnotised girl of the night before had been shooed away with
horrific insults that only an eternity of brooding in damnation can
devise, and when the demon's hangover had worn off. He also had the
decency to tell me in detail what my breakfast or my lunch tasted like,
and the perversity to explain the intricately sickly tastes of the
residue on the taste buds after a bad night.

I began to tire of Penemue, and started to dote over a plan. It would
be a risk, but it might terminate this whole tongue fiasco. I had
learnt that, if the demon's vocal indulgence was anything to set store
by, vocal ineptitude was an asset. I wanted to be my clumsy, drawling
former self again.

I picked my moment carefully. A skinny blond waif, whose make-up was
rapidly decaying as she slept, had her arm across me. I lifted it
gently off, and rolled out of the bed, leaving her hand slack on the
pillow. Penemue was snoring interminably, but I took every care to keep
my head steady, my neck straight, my jaws horizontal, so that he would
not wake from his contented bed of tonsils and pallet, where he and the
girl (whose name he had not even had the decency to acquire) had
enjoyed so much frisking some few hours ago. Penemue had a penchant for
French Kissing hitherto unknown in man.

Down the stairs, and into the study, taking every care to slide open
the stationary drawer noiselessly in the dark, too afraid even of the
flickering clockwork sounds that a neon light always emits to dare turn
it on. Hands slipping around the scissor handles, glinting under a
flake of moonlight, lips easing gently apart and then?I had him. He
squirmed in my grip but he didn't squirm enough. After some brutal
hacking I had him on the kitchen breadboard, where I was quick to dice
him, fling open the back door, and run him out to the lawn, scattering
him across the turf for the birds and hedgehogs to do with him as they
deemed fit.

Returning the kitchen, I felt as if a great burden had been lifted. I
flicked on the light and then saw, to my horror, that the jam cupboard
was open and the pickle jar in which I had preserved my original tongue
was lying on its side with the lid off - its contents drained and
empty. A drip of vinegar blupped onto the tiled kitchen floor. In
horror I saw that a trail of the greenish acid, mixed here and there
with a pickled onion or two, extended to the back door through which I
had just re-entered. My tongue, presumably no longer able to handle the
rejection and its acidic prison, had somehow broken free and
disappeared through the door - even as I was dispensing with its rival
in the garden. I wept a while over my misfortunes, but resolved that I
had come this far, and would see matters through to the end. The trail
of vinegar led swiftly to the drain outside the house, down which it
disappeared. I would follow it. Grasping a torch in one hand and the
biscuit tin in the other (because I might have need provisions), and
with no extra equipment save for a bag of screwdrivers and spanners, I
found a suitable man-hole, unscrewed the cover, and slipped down into
the sewers, and the inevitable catacombs that would accompany the
sludge, stuffed with refugees.

I found my tongue in a huge chamber where the air was a little less
stiff with the reek of silage. It was not alone. Sweeping the torch
beam across the cavernous room, I saw at least a thousand shreds of
pink, cowering on the flat, greened floor. Each was curled up with
various sentimental souvenirs, a teddy bear or a book of their former
master or mistress. There were tongues who had draped themselves with
necklaces or bracelets, tongues cherishing scraps of clothing - one
haggard looking strip of faintly grey flesh had a bottle of whiskey and
a packet of cigars. Most common were photos, pictures of the tongues'
beloved owners. I recognised a good deal of leading politicians amongst
the portraits.

Amidst this upsetting gathering sat my own tongue. It had only managed
to bring the salt shaker with it as a memento of our times together. It
had obviously been a rushed escape. But how was I supposed to make up
the ground between us when I had no way to speak, and was unaware of
how any of these tongues sensed the world around t hem? I took a few
paces forward, and the host of muscles quivered a little. One or two
squirmed and skipped their way into the safer, darker corners of the
room. My own old friend stayed put. The only gesture I could think of
was to open my maw wide, and shine the torch beam inside to reveal the
mangled mess inside my throat. I stood like this for several minutes
until, finally, my tongue hopped forward, leaving the security of the
salt shaker behind it. I stayed still, not wanting it to think that I
might try any trickery. Sheepishly, it's tip waved up at me, and then
it pressed itself together into something like a ball, and leapt!
Clearing my sewage stained trousers and landing just above my knee, it
struggled to climb up my jacket, hooking itself around folds in the
cloth. I stayed in that same position as it clambered over my chin and
hesitated on my gums. Then it plunged on in, and I closed my mouth.
There was a gentle patter coming from throughout the chamber, as the
gathered tongues thumped gently on the floor.

'Forgive me,' I said, and the words in themselves were
forgiveness.

Together, we turned, and headed back to the surface. The night air felt
like ice dissolving on my tongue. I was overjoyed at the taste, coupled
as it was with the acrid tang of pickled onion.