Marko Hautala - The Black Tongue (2015 edition) •••

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright 2014 Marko Hautala

Translation copyright 2015 Jenni Salmi

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Previously published as Kuokkamummo by Tammi Publishers in Finland in 2014. Translated from Finnish by Jenni Salmi. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015.

Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

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ISBN-13: 9781503945845
ISBN-10: 1503945847

Cover design by Scott Barrie

CONTENTS

As long as a working capital of accumulated hatred and suspicion exists at the center of the community, it will continue to increase no matter what men do.

Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred

THE GRANNY AND HER HATCHET

Youre all sitting here wondering what Granny Hatchet does. Granny Hatchet kills children.

Shes as old as the oceans and the sky. She lurks along the seashore, shuffling her feet between large rocks and behind fallen trees. She minces like a mink on her bare, slim toes. And everyone who happens upon her yard without permission either dies or goes insane. She waits until some foul-mouthed girl or boy drops behind the rest of the group, either to take a piss or to text a friend or to look at a butterfly or to save a little baby bird. She waits until you turn your back on her. Then she whacks you right between your shoulder blades with her hatchet and all the air is knocked out of your lungs and your legs go numb.

She turns you over.

She sticks her black tongue out at you.

She has a wispy old-lady mustache.

And then youre done.

You just want to crawl into a hole where you wait to die.

Sometimes she eats your heart. She digs it out of your chest with that hatchet of hers, even if youre still alive. She plants these hearts among her potatoes and waits until theyve turned almost black. Then she chews on the hearts with her toothless mouth. She thinks wearing dentures is demeaning. And this chewing can take up to an hour. She closes her eyes and remembers the good old days and how everything used to be right in the world.

She sees everything in the Suvikyl woods. She knows who you are just by the way you smell. When she takes a whiff of the wind, she looks like a fox sniffing gasoline, nostrils flared, alert.

She sneaks around in the shadows and stares at all the apartment buildings with their lights turned on and TV screens flashing and peoples shadows moving behind curtains, and she mutters nasty things at those shadows.

Shes invisible to most, unless she wants to be seen. She can stand so still that you will look past her although shes standing right in front of you. Shes been on Earth for so long that you cant tell her apart from a knotty burl growing on a tree. So if youre walking along a forest path and suddenly the air around you smells like potatoes in a damp root cellar, youd better run. Dont stop and look around. Youd better haul ass.

She lived in Suvikyl before the apartment buildings and town houses and rich folks homes at the end of Patteriniemi Road, and she loathes them all. The buildings are too straight and square, and their walls echo everything back at her. She trudges across yards, but only when its dark, moving slowly and hunched over as if all her muscles were wracked by uncontrollable spasms.

But in the woods she can hold her breath for an hour. Sometimes she lies down so still that moss spreads across her shoulders and maggots squirm their way into her mouth, thinking, This ripe carcass here is a real treat . When she coughs, maggots shoot out of her mouth.

One time, the son of that gypsy family, the Hagerts, was walking home drunk along the seashore when he spotted a burl on a tree. He was sure the burl hadnt been there before. Hey! he called out. Dont you be hiding from me or Ill choke you like a rat. The burl didnt move, so this Hagert boy pulled a knife out of his boot, sat down on the side of the road, and waited. He woke up the next morning with a crumpled piece of paper stuffed in his mouth. As he pulled it out, three baby teeth fell out of the folds. On the paper was a message: Rokelou yike a chat.

Afterward, no Suvikyl gypsy ever walked after dusk. They all rushed to the parking lot and piled into an old Mercedes, glowering at people through fogged-up windows as they drove off.

Granny Hatchet despises electric lights. She loathes them. At night, in the dark, you can hear her shrieking and cursing. The noise is frightfulshe sounds like a woman who has lost her voice but is still forcing herself to keep on screaming.

She hacks at rotten trees with her hatchet and yanks moss off rocks as she scurries by. She nails squirrels onto tree stumps, leaving their little skeletons for berry pickers to find in the fall. When she sees a robins nest, she whacks at it until only bloodied feathers remain.

She wont tolerate any sort of screwing around on her land. Should she catch you making out on her property, she wont forget until your shameful deeds are settled with blood the color of an overripe lingonberry.

She drinks brown sewage water straight out of the canal and uses it to brew coffee in an old pot. She has at least a thousand glass jars in her cellar, all filled with what looks like black milk. Thats why her tongue is always so black. Nobody knows what the black milk actually is, but it keeps her alive. She never gets sick, not even when she eats poisonous white amanita mushrooms and weaves ropes out of live adders.

Someone saw her dragging a boat in the canal one misty morning with one of those ropes made of adders, and the boat brimmed with a thousand live adders. A human child was seen struggling underneath the pile of snakes, but nobody saw the childs face.

She wont set foot in that boat herself, no way, because shes afraid of waterexcept the shallow water in the canal and the sewage water she drinks. She also wont wet her feet in the sea, not even if the shore were on fire. The sea is her enemy. She cant even stand its smell. Yet she stays near the shore and wont leave. The Devil only knows why.

Sometimes when dusk falls, she pretends to be a little girl. She squeezes her bones into her bodys cavities and slumps to look shorter. She hides her hatchet between rocks and walks straight up to fishermen on the shore, cooing to them in a child-like voice that theres some fine pussy available and nobody else ever needs to know.

Those who have talked about this have described her pussy looking like a sucking mouth that mumbles and smacks its lips. If you have sex with her, you end up going to the hospital, where they wont be able to recognize the weird bacteria they see under the microscope.

When the first Somalis moved into the apartment buildings, you could hear her hissing at the edge of the woods and parking lots after it got dark. When the first girl was delivered to the Granny, she kept her alive and wondered what the hell this is, this thing thats darker than her sewage-water coffee. She tore the girls scarf off and allowed the wind to press it to her own face, and then she just stood there blindly facing the sea, probably smelling the bazaars from distant lands. She stood like that for so long that the girl slipped away. Grannys taken many others since her, and now she knows that inside, their hearts are all the same color. They all turn black and tender. They all taste the same as her gums gnaw on them.