Micro Series

Laci Mosier

French Kissing

I spent years researching the types of plants that can kill a person: oleander, hemlock, angel’s trumpet, and a dozen lethal others. You said you had discovered the plant antidote to them all, growing by the house with no roof. The plant’s leaves grew long and stood straight out of the ground like foot-long tongues trying to lick the sky.

     We each plucked a leaf from the ground, opened wide, and slid the thick ends of the long blades into each other’s mouths. Microscopic barbs covered the leaves; the leaf tongues hooked in and took over our regular tongues. Wet with dew, these new tongues lolled out of our mouths like a dog’s. We leaned into each other and started to kiss, badly. You ran your spiked tongue up my neck, into my ear, and down my breasts. Slid it back and forth over my nipples.

     When it was over, I saw that your leaf tongue had fallen out, leaving behind a gaping hole of nothing. I tried to kiss the Nothing. I would have opened your lips, cranked your jaw wide, and crawled into the pit of Nothing if I could have. If only you had let me.

     But you walked away and all at once my regular tongue, the tongue of my mother, the tongue on which I’d tasted you a thousand times before, returned. Quickly, I tried to say everything that was left to say, but this new-old tongue didn’t know how to be a tongue anymore, so my words tripped and tumbled out. The “I love you” and the “please stay” got twisted into a silence so sticky you could eat it.

What a Dash Becomes

When the second pink dash appeared in the small white bubble, my life whorled into a ceaseless spiral. This line—so faint that if you close one eye and squint the other, it would disappear altogether—contained an unknowable loop of doom, loop of life, loop of what could be and what could not be. At that moment, time slowed slowed slowed as if the hands in clocks themselves grew too tired to tick, the ink on pages too sluggish to dry. 

     I rode the subway to the clinic, and the woman across from me had a tattoo of oleanders spread across her right knee cap. The pink flowers bloomed wildly up her thigh and disappeared under the raw edge of her denim shorts. I wondered how far into the darkness the flowers reached. She rooted around in her oversized purse for a long time before finally pulling out a gold tube of lipstick. She applied a fresh coat and leaned down to kiss her kid’s forehead, leaving behind a messy blotch of love.

     The girl‚ who I hadn’t noticed at all until that moment, giggled and quickly wiped the smear away. She wore a fanny pack covered in Hello Kitty stickers and swung her hairy legs with ruffled socks and velcro shoes from side to side to side. I noticed she had a freshly skinned knee, opposite her mother’s flowers. I stared at that blob of wet blood coming from her newly ripped-off skin. Same color as the dash in the bubble. I watched it coagulate.

Staring in the Bathroom Mirror in a Dive Bar After a Breakup

Her perfume reminded me of a wet dog. A sour-smelling dog left out in the rain. A runaway dog looking for a bone. No, looking for a home. Her perfume made me homesick. No, not homesick. Lovesick. No, not for him. For him. Always him. Why can’t she get over him? Blow him like a wad of snot out of her mind into a handkerchief. She could get a pill for that. An antihistamine. No, an antidepressant. I’m not depressed though; I’m lovesick, she tells the girl putting on orange lipstick in the mirror. She presses her glossy lips together over a folded white napkin. When she pulls the paper from her mouth, there’s a perfect print of two coral lips—a Rorschach test: a butterfly. a boy. a blowfish. an ocean. She pops her lips together, licks the tips of her pointer fingers, and tenderly runs the wet ends over each eyebrow, which are both overgrown and wild now. She thinks about how nearly everything about her is overgrown and wild now. Well not now, but ever since she fell ill, you know, with the lovesickness.

     That sick sickness.

© Variant Literature Inc 2023