=Anywhere at All=

The woman sat on a bench by the sea with an urn holding the ashes of her parrot. Down the beach a ways, some boys were playing sword fight with driftwood. She recalled the days when she didn't have a care in the world. No, she didn't; that's a lie. She always had at least two or three cares in the world. A small white dog comes bounding up the shoreline; it seems to belong to no one. Wait. Maybe his owner is that dark greenish-brown speck coming from the direction of the amusement park. In the urn, she imagined her tongue, nothing but ashes. She saw it smoldering at the bottom of the utility sink where she burned the parrot, stirring the charred remains with a bar-be-cue fork. Who knew feathers would stink so much when they burned? It took an absurdly long time for the flames to consume them all. She squirted more fire accelerant to revive the failing embers. She fed the limping flames that wearily rose with pages torn from an old telephone directory, listings of all the people she would never talk to. As she was thinking these thoughts, a man had come up to fish. He threw his line into the blind water, reeled it in, cast it out again. He repeated and repeated and repeated this routine. They say there are less fish in the ocean than ever. Sometimes, in fairytales, the hero catches a talking fish. Not in this fairytale, though. If she were the fish she wouldn't talk; and no one would expect it of her. She would only gape, drowning in oxygen. If she were the fisherman, tongueless, she wouldn't answer. Dialogue, the experts say, is an important part of a story. Her hand twitches in her lap, wanting a pen, which she had the foresight to leave behind. You had to be careful. Tongues, like tumors, could grow back anywhere at all.