Speak of Evil: Chapter 1

They want a confession. They want me to talk.

I take the pencil and notepad that’s on the table they’ve got me handcuffed to and write down: Get me a pack of smokes and a tape recorder and I'll tell you everything.

They look at each other for a moment before rushing out of the room to get the things I asked for. I sit in silence and wait on them to return.

They burst back into the room and place the tape recorder on the table. One of them tosses a pack of Camels into my chest and tells me to spill my guts. I signal for his lighter and he slides it across the table to me. I light a cigarette and point to the door. They look at each other funny and I shoo them away with my hand. Once they’re outside and the door is shut I press record. The tape is rolling.

Smoke swirls in the air and I lose myself for a moment. I take a drag from my cigarette and snub it out in the ashtray beside the recorder. I clear my throat and light another smoke.

“My name is Mathew Atwood,” I say. “These are the first words I’ve ever spoken. They’ll also be the last, so listen. This is what really happened…”

I haven't always been a mute.

********

I wasn’t born a mute. There was a time, brief but existent, when I was perfectly normal. It was a long time ago and lasted only half a year, but it was a time I’ve dreamed of for nearly three decades. I guess I should tell the story of how it happened. So, here it is…

I was born in the Mississippi Delta. If you’ve never been there, lucky you. It was a small town with nothing to do but drink and beat your wife. My father indulged himself in both of these pastimes.

At seventeen years of age, my mother became pregnant and, despite my father’s beatings and mistreatments of my mother when he was in his drunken rages, somehow she—and I—survived the nine months of pregnancy. On the first day of summer in 1979, I was born.

When I was six months old, my father, in a drunken rage, stabbed my mother a total of twenty-six times in the chest. After she quit kicking and screaming, he started tearing the house apart, breaking everything he got his hands on before finally staggering into the bedroom and collapsing, overturning my crib in the process. So, there I was, in the middle of the aftermath.

I crawled through the house, over the debris that was left from my father’s destruction, over my dead mother’s corpse, and into the kitchen where something caught my eye--shiny fragments of broken glass. It’s funny how shattered glass can look so beautiful when the light hits it. It’s like a look-but-don’t-touch thing, like fire. I didn’t know any better. Being a baby, half a year old, I liked to put things in my mouth.

My tongue was shredded when the police finally arrived. I’d been chewing on the shards of glass and severed the nerves that control tongue movement. So, I just kept on chewing, innocently stupid and numb in the mouth. The doctors were able to save my life but my tongue was history. Of course I don't remember all of this, but I've done my research--police reports, newspaper clippings, my father's prison journal. This is the story as I understand it, as best as I can reconstruct it.

Somethings just stay with you forever. I still can't get the taste of glass and blood out of my mouth.