“Would you have, if you’d caught him?” Amy asks.
“Kind of a dumb question now, don’t you think?”
“How did you know it wasn’t me?”
“What?”
“You said you knew right away. How?”
“Easy,” I tell her. “The girl in the video, she was naked.”
“Yes…?”
“She didn’t have any scars.”
“Oh.”
I’d never heard of deepfakes until Amy explained them to me after everything calmed down. Basically, you take dozens (or hundreds) of photos of someone’s head, upload them into an algorithm for like twenty-four straight hours, then you’re able to replace the head of a person in a pre-existing video with the head you uploaded. Internet dickheads do it a lot to troll people they hate. Make it look like their “enemies” are having sex on camera. “Revenge porn is big with these nerds,” she told me after school that day. I’d come running to her house in tears and she’d met me at the front door, took me around back to the tire swing behind their garage.
“That’s what this is?” I asked her. “Revenge porn?”
And she nodded. “He uploaded it on all the major sites. Emailed everybody at school. They think it’s me.”
“But it’s not.”
“You know that doesn’t matter.”
“We have to do something,” I said. “We can’t let him get away with this.”
Back in the bathtub, Amy nods. “And we did do something, didn’t we?”
“We took it too far,” I whisper. “Everything just kept getting worse.”
“Do you want me to apologize?”
“No,” I tell her. “Please. Never apologize.”
She laughs. “Motherfuckin’ tongues.”
And I return the laugh with one of my own. “Motherfuckin’ tongues.”
“I guess, in retrospect, substituting had been a bad idea.”
It isn’t like we were left with much choice. The spell called for a beef tongue and we’d tried to obtain one. What we hadn’t expected was how expensive they’d end up being. The cheapest one we found locally cost over twenty dollars. And, since butchers typically did not accept Hot Topic and iTunes gift cards as valid currency, that left us shit out of luck.
And who knows? That could have been the end of it, right? Except I couldn’t let things rest. Joe had to fucking pay. I started thinking about Spot, still fresh in the grave in our back yard. The Amazon delivery incident had only occurred a couple weeks ago at that point. It wouldn’t cost a dime to dig him back up. Why would anybody notice? It’d be easy. And it was. That very night, I snuck out with a shovel, spent fifteen-to-twenty minutes unearthing the ground. We hadn’t even stuck Spot in a box. Just chucked him in, unprotected, for the insects to feast. A much bigger challenge followed, however. Prying open his mouth and pulling out his tongue far enough to cut it off. Doing all of this without puking in his tiny grave. I kept expecting Spot’s corpse to suddenly lash out and bite my fingers. I would have deserved it.
The next day, I got up early and met Amy at her house. By then we were skipping school like it was a hobby.
“Who needs school?” Amy asks in the bathtub. “Anything you want to know can be found on the internet.”
“Like spells?” I respond, a little snide maybe.
“I wonder how grumpy all those old magicians would get if they discovered one day their secret grimoires would be uploaded as PDFs for the whole world to look at whenever they wanted.”
“Probably pretty grumpy.”
“Oh well,” she says. “They’re dead now, anyway.”
“Aren’t we all?” I ask her.
She ignores me and kisses my cheek again. “When you brought me the dog’s tongue, I couldn’t believe it.”
“You didn’t think I would do it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“You never get a bad feeling for absolutely no reason?”
The spell was simple, Amy assured me. People did it all the time, especially the mob. The mob? I’d shouted in her empty house. And she nodded, explained sometimes people tried testifying against them in court, so what did they do? Performed a beef tongue spell on the witness. Real bona fide hoodoo. Suddenly the witness no longer wants to testify. What this spell does, she told me, is convince people to stop talking shit about you. It gives them a stern warning that you aren’t someone to be fucked with, or else.
“So,” she said, taking the plastic bag holding Spot’s tongue, “let’s give this motherfucker a warning, shall we?”
Trying to remember the ritual now gives me a headache, or maybe I already had a headache. Starvation is rotting me from the inside out. “You already had the supplies ready,” I tell Amy in the bathtub.
“I’m a collector. It’s what I do.”
“A collector of what?” I ask her.
But she only grins, then sticks her tongue out and licks the tip of my nose.
I stood aside and watched her get to work, like she’d performed the spell a thousand times before. Slitting open Spot’s tongue lengthwise and setting it on a glass saucer. “Back to you in a second,” she’d told the tongue, as if it were still alive, as if it could hear her. Then, on a small piece of brown paper, she wrote Joe’s name three times in a stacked column. After rotating the paper counterclockwise, she then scribbled SHUT THE FUCK UP across each use of his name.
“I remember you asking me if I was sure it was going to work,” Amy says, lips next to my ear in the bathtub. “Wasn’t it fun, back when there was still room to doubt each other?”
“I never doubted you.”
“But you could have.”
“The stuff you dabbed on the paper. The one you wrote Joe’s name on. What was it?”
“Shut the fuck up oil,” Amy says.
“Ha ha.”
“I’m serious.”
“You made it?”
“From a recipe I found online. Slippery tongue, deerstongue, nettle, sassafras, and… bloodroot, I think.”
“Where the hell did you even get all that?”
“I told you. I’m a collector.”
“I didn’t know you were so good with needles, either. The way you sewed the paper into Spot’s tongue, it was all very neat and professional.”
“Aww, thank you, baby.”
Sewn it, yes, but also tied the remaining black thread around the tongue like one would restrain a prisoner. Then she carved Joe’s name into a black candle, along with SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH, and dug it into the tongue, using its rotted meat as a makeshift base.
She dumped the rest of the shut the fuck up oil on the tongue.
After she lit the wick, she had me sit across from her, and together we prayed over the flame, reciting words that made sense in the moment but no longer sound intelligible here in my parents’ bathroom. The wax melted down the candle, sizzling against the tongue and conjuring a grotesque scent of decay. Once the candle was finally spent, she dropped the congealed tongue into a glass jar of vinegar. This way, she explained, anything Joe tried saying about her would be turned against him. This is how we really make him suffer.
The next day at school, our homeroom teacher informed the classroom Joe had passed away in his sleep. She didn’t specify how, but I already knew the truth.
“He choked to death on his own tongue,” I whisper in the bathtub, holding Amy so tight I’m afraid she might break.
“He got exactly what he deserved,” she tells me.
“Is that what we’re getting now?” I ask her. “Exactly what we deserve?”
Her response arrives with zero hesitation: “Yes.”