aglossia
she simply has no tongue. taste allows us to lick the rotted flesh of a feeling, the fecund fruit of a reflection. we know these things to be repulsive because we can taste them. absent a tongue those around her are forced to abuse their precious mouths, regurgitating reality into this starving baby bird. even she knows that vomit does not taste good. upon contact it digs dirty, broken nails into her eyes, ripping tears from their ducts.
her teeth are sharp and she uses them to speak. blessed with resilient enamel and 32 extra oral muscles, she manipulates the vibrations from her throat by widening, grinding, scraping her teeth. the gums are not as lucky. a ferrous creek drips from the edges of her lips, so she attempts silence as a dam.
without a tongue, silence is suffocation. untasted, the day cannot move past her throat. she is starving. by evening she can feel her stretched esophagus pinching her trachea, threatening to finally pierce it. she speaks. asking to be fed, desperate to hide her desperation. there will never be a camouflage so powerful, but they still give her what she needs. they pull it out of her throat, masticate, regurgitate.
eventually, the creek becomes a river. the river erodes its landscape, exposing its cardiac headwater and running itself dry.