Burnt Tongues

by Chuck Palahniuk

  No one ever really forgets about Redemption. But they certainly act that way.

  Her confessions stick to your soul like tar. Even after the goop dries and cracks away, a dark stain lingers.

  I don’t know if she’s trying to own the pain or seek out a kindred spirit or what.

  And because this is always the second thing people ask, yeah, I threw her a bone. She’s my on-again-off-again girlfriend’s alcoholic best friend, so accidents happen. It only happened that once. And I was really, really drunk. Hank Williams, Sr. drunk. Homer Simpson drunk.

  But keep that to yourself. It’s our secret.

  And just because this is the third thing people always ask, yes, before Vegas. Although she often makes me wonder if size really does matter.

  When Redemption tells this story there are more details I won’t get into. Words I can’t say with a straight face like spurt and orgasm and thrust. Words like pain and hot, sticky mess. When she tells it her way, with all the graphic finery and ruined upholstery and crawling and bucket of generic lube, half the room empties before the part where she straps on the spiked collar.

  The folks who leave have heard it before, and once is one time too many. The rest, like you, well, that saying, “Once bitten, twice shy,” will make a whole new kind of sense in a moment.

  For the virgin listeners, when they’re thoroughly shaking their heads and looking in every direction but Redemption’s, holding their lover’s hand tighter than tight, their buzzes not merely worn off but blown clear away, like a tornado scalping a trailer park, Redemption says she’s worried the FBI are going to show up at her door one day. That the driver dude got busted or something, she thinks. Because they promised to send her a copy of the video but never did, the liars.

  And that’s the real issue, she says, being used. Being cheated like that. Otherwise she’s really excited about graduating from aesthetician school and getting her own place. Something with a big yard. Because she’s been keeping her eyes open.

  This is so twisted that even at the Freaky Fetish Fest, doms and subs were seeing eye to eye on how twisted it was.

  Even at the Rubber Ball, the veteran dominatrix who struts around in the gestapo cap appeared a little upset.

  The fat accountant who thinks it’s “wicked cool” to show up in nothing but strands of electrical tape, even his pasty ass thought Redemption was in bad taste.

  The last time I heard her tell it there was this torso guy listening in—just a head and rib cage. He’ll lie on the floor at goth/industrial nightclubs and pay gals to walk across his chest in stiletto heels. Pinned down, he looked up Redemption’s skirt and said, “Now that’s twisted.”

  With each telling of her story, she drops a new detail. The second time it was the breed. After that, his name. Once she described the finer points of a certain position. Complained about the harshness of the lighting. With each rendition, the scene sharpens into focus. With every close-up, the room

  gets emptier.

  After a few public showings with less than positive reviews, Redemption armed herself with a preemptive defense. Rationalizing it as a natural relationship. Citing historical precedent way back to ancient Greece. She uses the word love. The same word she used to describe how she felt about volunteering at the humane society and Dark Eyes vodka.

  Redemption’s current boyfriend and I don’t hang out. I’m not what you’d call husky, but no way can I squeeze past the elephant in our room. There isn’t enough cotton in the Deep South to weave a skirt big enough for this issue. But our girlfriends are best friends. I can’t exactly avoid the guy.

  At one party we ditched out to avoid the looks while Redemption told her tale. He told me that contrary to popular belief the human egg can actually be impregnated by canine sperm. The female miscarries before the abomination gets too far along. It doesn’t look like anything, he said, no tiny fingers or toes or nothing. Nothing a Republican law would force you to keep. You won’t have to raise some Anubis Minotaur thing in your attic. Just flush a squashed tomato. Claims he did some research on the Internet. He said, considering . . . who wouldn’t?

  Around the bars they call Redemption lots of names, behind her back mostly, and Redemption isn’t one of them. None of her nicknames are accurate. None of them are specific the way kids earn titles like Stinky or Fatso or Dicknose or Dogfucker. People in the know use common pejoratives in place of what we’re all really thinking. To create a cushion of distance, they call her sicko, pervert, slut. That tramp. They flat-out refuse to use their imagination.

  No one uses the B word.

  You can tell a lot about people by the names they call others when they aren’t around.

  After her relationships inevitably fizzle, you don’t see those guys bonding over the shared experience. They don’t high-five and pound beers on the rebound while comparing fish stories. They sit at opposite sides of the bar. At parties they stand with their backs to one another at all times.

  When she’s all buckled knees wobbling on heels with one palm planted to the wall and the other swinging a big plastic bottle, starting in with, “So, tell me if you think this is really perverted . . . ,” those guys dip out first.

  The last party she bid everyone gather round, the buddy I brought along got too drunk and freaked out to let himself ignore the telltale signs. He’d recently moved in with his longtime girl. They’d always wanted a puppy. To test the long-term potential of the relationship before taking the next step, he said. A trial run. But after hearing Redemption’s confession, he’s having second thoughts.

  You see, he found some stuff on her computer.

  Knowing the Internet is a jungle of pitfalls and vipers coiled to strike, he reasoned it away as spyware. A web surfing accident. Browsing history isn’t conclusive the way your e-mail address is. But the things Redemption said that night got him thinking maybe beastfuck.com showing up in the search history wasn’t the side effect of innocent browsing.

  Maybe that essay in the cache about safely training your pet for coital partnership he was compelled to read wasn’t the byproduct of clicking a pop-up ad promising 50 percent off Vera Wang pumps.

  On the ride home he explained how once the dog is all the way in, there’s no returning him. Dogs have this joint, this knot in the middle of their dick that swells up as big and hard as an onion and traps the pair together until he’s finished bucking and shooting his load.

  He told me about cases where women have gotten trapped with the dog inside them. That knot thing engorged with blood, swollen to the size of a softball, wouldn’t come out. And someone had to call 911.

  Dogs don’t tire out like us, he said. Their money shot isn’t a few spurts before it’s time to roll over and think about a sandwich. You might say they’re the Warren Buffett of money shots. Imagine a fire hose of glue. They cum and cum and cum. It can surge for like forty-five minutes while the female is attached, locked in with him pounding away. And when Rex or Rocky or Bruiser finally deflates and pulls out this bucketload of mess gushes, and I don’t want to repeat how he described that.

  My friend was like, Imagine bringing your friends over after the bars for a few beers to find your wife mounted on all fours, manicure shredded by the new linoleum, demanding five, ten, maybe twenty more minutes, who knows, ’cause Buddy isn’t quite satisfied.

  It’s funny, right?

  Right?

  Going green around the gills, he complained the keg beer wasn’t sitting so well, and on this message board he discovered while snooping, the women posters confessed that semen is integral to their overall sexual experience. That their dogs fill them in a way no man has ever come close. And etymology aside, they really do have a bone in their boner.

  This is so taboo that even the Internet doesn’t have a slang term for it.

  They’re called zoophiles, technically speaking. If you want to be politically correct about it. They call their lifestyle “animal husbandry” instead of, you know, the B word.

  They
argue the qualifying difference is consent. Judge all you want, but you can’t prove the animal isn’t having a blast.

  Head out the passenger side window to barf, my buddy said these “zoosexual” videos have popped up all over the place. People are going to prison. The dogs are up for adoption, but they’re tough to retrain once they get a taste of the good life, and no one wants them. Well, no family. Especially not with daughters. He said go ahead, Google it. Some old queen was sodomized to death by a horse, and you can check it out if you’re so inclined. Gives a new meaning to the term horsepower.

  Google it.

  Do it.

  I dare you.

  And, yeah, this is so illegal that even on the Internet it’s illegal.

  Except for in Denmark. And Hungary.

  Brazil is a major exporter of these films. In the Netherlands there’s a Great Dane named Hector that’s considered a legit star. For a small fee you can meet Hector.

  And to be fair, we all know anything goes in the Land of the Rising Sun.

  “There are pay websites with videos,” he said. “Hundreds of them.”

  Not just dogs and horses but goats, too. And, yeah, your obligatory Tijuana donkeys. And some of these women are hot. You’d take them home without a second thought. If you didn’t know any better.

  Women with loyalty issues who equate love to dependence. It makes sense in a twisted man’s best friend sort of way.

  With his girlfriend asleep in the other room, my friend was free to roam the wild of the World Wide Web. One thing led to another, and he ended up browsing an info site listing average penis lengths separated by breed. The forum had hundreds of personal experience testimonials. Explicit directions. Positions, tips, pragmatic preemptive measures you wouldn’t think of until the damage is done, like socks

  over paws.

  Along with asserting articulate defenses against abuse allegations, the website’s author claims a dog’s cock is three times cleaner than a human male’s. Her veterinarian said so. She alludes to psychological studies that report 80 percent of women have fantasies about being taken by an animal. The source is not attributed. And since it’s no longer an analogy she never uses the term “doggy style.”

  She called it “making love.”

  When my friend’s confession was interrupted by him puking out the window and down the side of my car, my on-again girlfriend’s little teacup dog started going nuts in the backseat, forcing its golf ball–sized rat head through the smoking crack in the window, trying to lap up the foamy stream of vomit trailing toward the trunk.

  My sometimes girlfriend brings the damn thing with her everywhere. She’s even got a patent leather carrying purse with its name in rhinestones. It cost her well over a grand. The Chihuahua, not the purse.

  Wiping his mouth with napkins from the glove compartment, apologizing and such, my buddy started in with details about what happens when that fist-sized knot is pushed in all the way and gets stuck in the vaginal cavity. How zoophiles call it a “tie,” and this is supposed to be the best most intense part, he was saying, when that heart-clenching burble of a police siren announced the red and blue lights in my rearview mirror, ending the discussion.

  In the backseat my on-again girlfriend got all excited, the dog yipping along as it burrowed between her legs. Looking back at the police cruiser, she said, “Ooh! He’s got a Rin Tin Tin.”

  I said, “Face forward and shut up.”

  In my rearview the hood of the squad said K-9.

  My friend said, “Chew on a penny. I heard that fucks up the Breathalyzer. Got any peanut butter?”

  “No,” I said, “that’s an urban myth. Some shit people tell you so you go through life believing in bullshit.”

  His story must have sobered my face to a point beyond speculation because the cop just poked his head in and said, “Next time he does that, pull over.”

  “And you”—he knocked on the back window, the little dog wagging its ass at his face, its head buried in the junction of my on-again’s legs—“restrain your pet and fasten your seat belt, miss.”

  Knowledge can be a real curse. Short of a serious concussion or a lobotomy, you can’t undo it. Many a drunk have tried. And with the Internet, knowledge is now as fast and cheap as any girl who names herself after a European car. I liked it better when you couldn’t be so sure. When terrifying rumors were distant enough to be a UFO at the bottom of Loch Ness. When the horribly compelling train-wreck tragedies of less fortunate people’s lives were only as real as you let them be. Just a cover of a magazine, a black-and-white photo on some late-night commercial for a charity. Now confirmation is just a mouse click away. Pedophiles and violent felons live on every block. They bag your groceries and ring up your gas.

  And any private problem that’s been tearing you up inside, whatever deranged deviancy you’ve been hiding, someone else out there shares it. You’re not so weird. You’re not alone. You’re not sick. And because misery loves company they’ll encourage you. These people on the Internet message boards. Lessening their burden, diluting the potency of their agony by sharing the load through a network. Others spreading their gospel like a virus.

  The administrator for the advocacy page, she posted a ten-thousand word essay on fellatio technique. A first timers FAQ. She delves into the biological minutia of the slick scum coating a dog’s penis, except she calls smegma “natural secretion,” and expounds on the many benefits of bathing your dog before giving him a blow job.

  This is probably the last time you’ll laughingly refer to a dog’s pecker as “lipstick.”

  She explains the three stages of secretion, the final being a highly alkaline “prostate fluid.” And she says not to worry; you won’t become ill, so go ahead and swallow.

  When priming the aspiring zoophile, she outlines the biological composition of leaking milky fluids that will stretch and droop as sticky as webs of molasses. Her essays employ the technical word for every ingredient: 20 percent water, ash, protein, lipids, potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, iron, chlorides, sulphur, amino acids, albumins, proteoses, nucleoproteins, mucin, albumoses, fat globules, thiamin, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, niacin, ascorbic acid, enzymes, and fructose. As if any degree of distancing academic jargon could make a dog’s dick taste like anything else.

  Put the thing in a bun and cover it in chocolate syrup with marshmallow sprinkles, but a dog dick is a dog dick.

  These zoophiles, they frown upon use of the word beast.

  As if some Pavlovian retraining could suppress the gag reflex and divorce our humanity.

  As I pulled up to his apartment, my buddy asked me for advice. “Should I confront her? Or just play dead?”

  All I wanted to do was crawl into bed and forget, but he wouldn’t leave.

  “I mean, if it’s consensual,” he said, “who are we to judge?” He looked to me for justification, his hand hesitating on the door handle, the question hanging in the air between us.

  I said enough is enough, dude. Thanks but no thanks. We breached the line of decency a long time ago. I have zero desire to know what comes next. My stage name could be Ignorant Bliss.

  But I lied. I found the web page.

  Don’t judge. You will, too.

  The B word advocate, she describes dogs as passionate, fiery, and enthusiastic lovers. Her “relationship” with dogs started at age nine. She “docked” with her first male that same year.

  She argues that a true animal abuser is one who doesn’t help their poor pet achieve release. She asks how you’d feel if you couldn’t jack off. If you couldn’t click away on your little keyboard to sate all your secret, shameful desires, dirty-typing strangers safely anonymized behind your Internet identity, while you think your girlfriend or wife or kids or whoever is sound asleep in the next room.

  She asks what sort of world we’d have with everyone pent up and frustrated all the time, living a lie, unable or unwilling to say the words that need to be said and do the things they’re
naturally programmed to do. Too neutered on pharmaceuticals or tranquilized on booze to find what they really need.

  It didn’t go over well, but this is why I disconnected our Wi-Fi.

  I’m too young to ruin a good thing. Legal sex is still fun. Right?

  One night while my girlfriend is quarantined in her triage of chocolate bonbons and Sex and the City reruns suffering through the feminine curse, I might accidentally take a wrong turn at Free streaming vids of sexy Maya Hills fucked doggy style, and the next thing you know it’ll require no less than a dozen Asian preteen amputees in plush costumes gorging on human fecal matter hot from the tap and stomping hamsters bloody with scuba flippers just to get me interested.

  Sounds interesting, but no thanks. Not again, anyway. I’m too old to learn any new tricks.

  When my friend got out of the car, he still couldn’t wrap his mind around it. Redemption had to be a victim, he said. Maybe all this shows is Redemption trying to face her demons, ready to either be burnt at the stake by the court of public opinion or exonerated and move on with her life.

  I said maybe she’s just starved for attention. Someone should give her a treat.

  That night my sometimes girlfriend’s itsy-bitsy runt-of-the-litter-worth-its-weight-in-gold Chihuahua did what it always does at bedtime—it mined under the sheets like the rodent it is, fidgeting until it found its way in, and nestled between my girlfriend’s thighs. Coiled up like a perfect cartoon shit. And for the first time I wondered, How did the dog learn to do that?

  My sometimes girlfriend, she’s always in heat. Disturbing story or no, near arrest or no, she’s a total nympho and starts caressing my neck and teasing her fingers between my legs, between her own legs, the dog there, and now isn’t a good time.

  I have a lot on my mind.

  Like the fact that my on-again-off-again girlfriend’s best friend fucked a Staffordshire terrier. And who knows what else.

  And liked it.

  Because Redemption shares this skeleton, I refuse to imagine the bones she’s burying.