Last Stop on the M Train

This short story is the result of a writing exercise. The first sentence is also the first sentence to a short story called The Golden Honeymoon. I simply took it out of context and made my own story.

Mother says that when I start talking I never know when to stop.

“Your mouth is like a stolen train rattling down the tracks,” she said. “The brakes are broken, the conductor is dead, and there’s a screaming woman tied down to the rails.”

This really screwed with my head for a while. I never looked at my toy train set the same way again. It seemed feral, a beast untamed which sat upon the floor of my basement in silent, chaotic turmoil. Of course, this frightened me, and so my mouth would rattle off to my mother until she could no longer take it, and then even longer still. Who knows what I said; it didn’t matter. I talked until my jaw locked. Then, with a sickening crack, I pried it open once more and continued my assault of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs.

My mouth moved so fast that my tongue had trouble keeping up with it. Under such intense speed, my lips broke free from my face entirely, followed by each individual tooth. They wiggled free of the gentle embrace of my pink gums and zoomed off through the air, much like baby birds finally taking that first leap and learning to fly. The last to follow was my tongue, a solitary muscle that squirmed in the air like a freshly-caught worm as it raced to catch up with the rest of my mouth. I watched all of my oral components wriggle their way under the crack in the front door, finding freedom in the crisp air to which they had never before been so fully exposed. I watched them flutter down the street and pass the line of the horizon, lost to the curve of the Earth.

When I sat down for dinner that night, my mother looked at my horribly disfigured face and smiled. Where my lips once were was only raw, fresh skin, which framed the toothless, bloody gums that protected the place where my tongue used to be, now merely a gooey, empty space.

“Why, William, there’s something different about you tonight. I can’t place it, but it’s quite the improvement!” She beamed, leaning over to plop a baked potato onto the plate in front of me. I tried to smile but quickly realized that my expressions must surely be grotesquely unreadable at this point, so I just forked a bit of potato and placed it on the empty, pink bed where my tongue used to lay, then slowly pressed it in between my sore gums; my new version of chewing. It was a pain like I had never experienced before... but at least it made Mother happy.

Author's Note

Would love any feedback here!