Possession of a tongue-eating louse is not in itself illegal – although laws to prevent the spread of foreign parasites in most countries make it borderline. Acquisition can be difficult. The louse requires certain conditions to thrive. A damaged or ill louse could prove dangerous, fatal in some instances. Dealers are a rare breed, hard to come by. Often you will find them in port cities, small coast towns in South America and along the trade routes that run down the West African coast – Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau.
There is a lively trade out of the urban area that hems the Cape Town harbour. Seek out one of the small diners specialising in seafood. Walk the narrow streets spiralling with galaxies of cheap discount stores, electronics and cell–phone repairs, lingerie shops and gambling parlours. Look for an eatery whose purpose and origins are indistinct. A hole in the wall without signage, its trade only identifiable by the row of low narrow tables, the smells that emanate from the kitchen. Do not be put off if your entrance is greeted by cold stares or open hostility from the other patrons. Remember, you are the foreigner in this context. Take a seat close to the window. When the owner comes, place your order. Persist, even if at first, he feigns ignorance or pretends not to understand your request. Say louse. Learn it’s street names: pou de langue, língua comendo piolho, ulimi kula chawa, ulwimi ludla ulouse. Wrap your tongue around the unfamiliar syllables. Say them with intensity.
If you are lucky, you will be led down a back street or through a narrow alleyway. Another block, a slight shift in demographics, warehouses and factory shops, street kids breathing glue and drag queens selling blowjobs. A back room behind an internet cafe or a small office in a warehouse. If one is prepared to negotiate, one can usually acquire a fresh specimen at a reasonable price. Take care in choosing. On the table is an iron box. The seller sits, turns the box in your direction. Unclasps the lid and swivels it back on its hinge.
The louses greet you in unison, a dense rabble of exotic flesh. They seem longer and thicker here, away from the confines of the mouth. An inexperienced eye might not understand their writhing but anyone with expertise will immediately recognise it as a kind of language; the miming of speech executed with exuberance. Bring your ear closer as if to listen. From that low angle note the merchandises’ appearance. Pay specific attention to colour and texture. A healthy louse is damp and pinkish white. Lean forward and it will rise upward; tip reaching towards you, shaft shifting in a quickened twitch.
Select a specimen, a beautiful mauve shaded urchin. Hold the louse in your upturned palm, cup it. Outside the mouth, the louse loses all agility, moves the way an inchworm does, scuttling in lines, creases, over the folds in the fingers. Its body is armoured in intersecting segments, which, when contracted give it the appearance of a tiny abstract porcelain sheep, a pale knobby creature, like a spectre or an alien, something born of an unknown alchemy. Its head is a small bead, bald and deceptively human, with piercingly black eyes that seem to look into you. The louse has no real legs to speak of. Its underside is a dusted pink, a quivering thing with folds that seem uncannily familiar: an eyelid wrinkled shut, a creased elbow, the pleats of the labia edged in loosely strung doily scallops that dance when you finger them.
Once you have ascertained that the louse is the real thing, not a mutant shrimp or sea-slug, some form of doctored crustacean or isopod, you will want to test its readiness for implantation. Lift the louse gently by positioning your thumb and index finger on either side of the thorax. Bring it to your mouth. Gripping the louse tightly, part your lips. Give it a taste of your tongue. Sometimes just revealing the tip is enough, other times you might need to be more persuasive, to thrust it far out or even wiggle it. Occasionally a small lick might be what’s required to provoke the desired reaction.
If the louse is ripe for tongue-eating, you will feel it; the change in pressure between your fingers, the thorax once slackened, suddenly erect and thrusting, reaching forward towards the pink wetness offered to it. Perhaps it is the premonition of blood, a smell, maybe a taste. The reaction is unmistakable, a sensation not unlike gripping a small penis, that of a child’s maybe – an immature object suddenly alerted to the lure of desire. Pluck at it and feel it react, quiver for an instant, then swell with blood, grow hot and hard… ready.
No one knows exactly what the louse is. Scientists, when forced to comment, point to Cymothoa Exigua, a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae, regularly found along the Gulf of California and north of the Gulf of Guayaquil, as well as in parts of the Atlantic. Jumping species is a common occurrence in nature, especially amongst diseases and parasites. Anyone who keeps dogs will tell you. The flea, the head louse – these jumps happen so regularly as to be almost every day. But the tongue-eating louse’s jump is inexplicable. It is momentous. A giant leap, outpacing evolution, overcoming species division; a sudden unexplained flight from sea to land, from fish as preferred host to man; swelling and morphing into something that resembles its aquatic ancestor only loosely.
There are those who theorise that it is an artificial construct; a product of modern science, genetically engineered in a laboratory. There is a top-secret facility in the desert. There are people with guns and dishonest government officials and there are large sums of money at stake. A specimen escapes or it is stolen. A pair of tongs and a small Styrofoam cooler is all it takes. A man in a dark suit walks quickly enough to seem purposeful yet not so fast as to arouse suspicion. A certain customs officer, invited for a whisky in a ship captain’s cabin. There is a beach near an Africom naval base on the East Coast of Africa. A body washed up. A man with no fingernails or genitals; whose ears are stubs; whose eyes are missing and face is badly beaten; a man who, in spite of everything, possesses a lithe, wet tongue inside his mouth with which to speak.
It is said the louses spread quickly via port cities. Foreign sailors who take up the practice as a form of body augmentation to signify bravery and sexual prowess – a practice then, not unlike tattooing or body piercing in origin. The bars and brothels near the harbour are numerous. On weekends they fill with seamen whose only diversion is karaoke and drunken congress with the prostitutes that service the area. The interior is nondescript. There is a video screen playing K-pop. A sailor hunched at the bar drinking beer – a foreign brand, illegally imported and available only in establishments like these. You take a seat and he turns towards you. His smile is crooked, too wide. He lifts his beer, tips his head back, jaw ajar. And then slowly he parts his teeth to reveal it: a tiny head peeling out from lips, a lustrous white worm, erect and coiling its smooth segmented surface.
The louse is a natural kisser, a master even. It seems to know instinctively how to work with tongues, to pleasure them. Strange how easily the disgust becomes commonplace and then welcome, desirable even. It is best to begin slowly. To bring it to your mouth and feel that smooth topside caress your skin. Now part your lips. As soon as the louse senses the proximity of a human tongue, it begins to quiver. Allow it in. Place the root of the thing against your palate, tickle the frill-like pleats on its lower ventral side with your tongue. Instantly it responds, moving side to side, then arching up and bowing down, tensely, feathered fins dancing on the surface of the taste buds. Saviour it, somehow familiar, the metallic suck of the taste of the cut. Note the buzzing sensation, like eating sherbet, the soft fizz as the citric acid reacts with the bicarbonate of soda. It is the feeling of something alive and breathing; bursting and nipping and sucking.
The practice is not without its dangers for both parties. Sometimes during a moment of pure exalted pleasure, the tongue-eating louse might decide to jump hosts. Who can say what provokes it? Could it be the same desire that fills you, the same lust, a sexual drive that becomes unbearable? Maybe it is purely functional; the louse discerns something in the new mouth that makes it a more attractive habitat. We know nothing of its criteria. Maybe the teeth are in better condition, less eaten by cavities, the gums less diseased, the saliva more alkaline or acidic and thus more inviting.
The shock of a louse detaching suddenly is said to be a grenade going off; the blow of a lost limb, an epileptic fit or brain aneurysm; waking with aphasia. The mouth is no longer capable of mediating speech. You can make noise with your vocal cords but not the sounds of vowels and consonants grouped into words. You might try to scream, but the cry lacks direction. It is a throat scream, coarse and shrill, emptied of infection. It doesn’t end so much as fade into hoarseness.
You cannot tell your partner what is happening. You do not need to. The louse is already attaching. Its frontal claws hook into the soft flesh. It embeds itself and begins to suck. Your partner coughs out blood and looks up at you. He or she begins to emit small whimpers, trying to get at it, fingers groping their mouth. It is difficult, impossible maybe, as hard to grab hold of a louse as is to catch a tongue. Go ahead and try it. Grip each side of the slippery muscle. Pull all you like but always the tongue glides away. You are empty handed, index and thumb blood smeared and spit coated.
According to reports, the pain as the louse embeds is unique. At first it is just a stab, something like a cavity, like sticking a soft spot. Then a throbbing, a soreness that pulses from the back of your head to the front of your skull. It stretches, your neck and shoulders succumbing as your blood is sucked up. Your mouth burns. Your throat feels raw, teeth buzzing. Jesus fuck, a pain that’s audible, that rings in your ears.
If you are serious about hosting a louse, isolate yourself. Lock yourself off from the outside world like a junky going cold turkey. Prescription painkillers are essentials, as is Paracetamol for the fever. Prepare everything. Chain the doors and remove the sim card from your phone so that you won’t be tempted to call for medical assistance. There is little doctors will be able to do for you anyway. By this stage, your tongue will already be dead in your mouth. The once-infused organ, gradually withered, sucked into a shrunken membrane. Soon decay will set in and then that will be gone too. You will swallow your tongue, the little that’s left of it. Suck it down like a sausage skin or the waxy membrane on the top of milk left out of the refrigerator.
The first few weeks of recovery are hell. The mouth is inflamed, gums red. There is constant bleeding. You curl up within the sheets and pray to be saved from the aftershocks. The shocks are internal: your brain refuses to accept the new invader. It views it as a form of cellular anarchy, a disorder, an internal disrespect for the laws of nature. The body seeks to eject the intruder, uses every mechanism at its disposal, sudden chills and fevers as white blood cells swarm the area.
Even if you survive the initial shock, it does not become easier. The louse is like a foreign object suddenly implanted; a dental brace or a tongue guard but alive, tight and squirming. Speaking is impossible, eating too. In some instances, the louse lodges itself too far back, too close to the soft palate, setting off the gagging reflex, resulting in an ongoing nausea.
Your mouth is constantly flooded with saliva. You try to spit but your tongue refuses to cooperate, to collect the salvia up and eject it. Drool runs down your chin, your mouth foams. Your dreams are flooded with legs and feelers. Lice bite your scalp, your ears, lay pale eggs that hatch and grow even larger. At night you wake up coughing, drowning in your own liquids. You rush to the mirror, convinced you’ve chewed it, open your mouth expecting to find hundreds of bisected louse bits trying to wriggle out over your lips.
Hosts report trouble with hearing, the mouth and the ear being, as they are, intimately joined. The ear, erect and facing out, but screwed inward, linked to the mouth by way of the spiral of canal. The louse is never still and every movement registers. The mouth is a cave, an acoustic conductor, inside, the sounds ricochet and vibrate. Some describe it as the grinding of teeth or a grating inside as if misaligned gears are meshing in improvised patterns. Others hear insects, the mouth infested with thousands of beetles rubbing up against themselves, spiny legs grinding on hard shells. Most experience it more as sort of sucking or eating, the empty mastication produced by the coming together and moving apart of gums wet with saliva.
And then slowly, slowly, you begin to adjust. The sound becomes normal, internalised, no worse than your regular grunts and slurps while eating. You can swallow again. At first, just water. Then soft foods that you do not need to chew. Finally, your teeth develop a rapport with the louse. They learn to work together, the subtle tongue movements that characteristically complement mastication, previously unnoticed. Now you are aware of them, you can map how food moves about in your mouth. You can tackle more solid things. You learn to share the louse’s love for seafood: abalone, shrimps, fresh oysters.
Language is the last thing to come. For months after, you stutter and speak in faulty grammar. There’s this inescapable sensation of a presence being with you. Some describe it as a ghosting. Yet, it is more a sensation of weight than an airiness, a stone in your mouth, a heaviness that hinders nuanced articulation. Without your tongue, sentences lose their former precision. Words are laboured. Phrases are approximations, attempts, odd scraps of stray verbiage. Sometimes you think you hear fragments of a foreign language. Is it Arabic? Amharic? Berber?
It is best to start with the basics. The simple sounds a tongue makes so many times that they roll off it without any effort. Ma and ba and pa and da. These baby utterances, meaningless in themselves, are sounds the tongue finds easiest to give shape and voice to. The muscles at the base simply go through the paces. At first your voice may sound different to you, unfamiliar, alien. The voice of a foreigner, heavily accented. It may stutter or stammer or slur, a voice stretched into slow motion like when a tape begins to deteriorate.
Then it comes back. The alphabet. Songs. Prayers. And discovery! New words. Sentence constructions you never dreamed of. Strange couplings of nouns and adjectives. New ways of annunciating syllables. The vowels escape, round and malleable, in soft and encircling coagulations. The louse is alert, dextrous, the fleshy strips on the underside of its body wriggle with vigour. Say, Cymothoa Exigua, Cymothoidae, tongue-eater, and feel the louse respond in your mouth, lift in recognition, squirm with pleasure.
Is it the host speaking or the louse? Scientists will tell you the question is ridiculous. Of course, it is the host. The louse has merely learnt to interpret the signals coming from the stub of the tongue. In this way, the louse is like the latest artificial limbs fitted with myoelectric devices that use electrodes to sense muscular impulses in the residual limb; a control system that detects signals and amplifies them to power electric motors that operate the prosthetic limb as though it were human, a normal leg or arm. Similarly, the louse learns to respond to the movements in the muscles and the signals that pulse from the brain. This code is then interpreted into movement.
And yet the stories persist. There are rumours of hosts who acquired extraordinary speaking ability since the implant. This is not just a matter of tone and texture, but also in the realm of vocabulary and even poetics. A former postal worker who becomes a famous poet. A website that claims a previous president of the United States, known for his oration, was a carrier. A detailed analysis of the president’s speaking patterns. Two recordings, side by side, red circles marking the deviation in the sine waves. Pictures, obviously doctored. A gallery of the president’s smile, before and after, shifting from wide toothy grin to tight-lipped. There are close ups of something lurking, a white presence hunched behind the presidential teeth. Has the president been caught masticating a piece of fried squid at some Japanese diplomatic luncheon or has he been infected?
It is perhaps not accurate to use the term “infected” for hosts. Ideas regarding species and purity are changing quickly. Medical science is evolving. Little by little we are all crossing over. Pig hearts are commonly transplanted. Soon, prosthetics will not need to mimic the cheetah’s legs, they will be them. The yearnings of a snail will one day be shared by snail-men, part molluscs, part human; the speech of a crustacean, by a louse-man.
But it’s not just its verbal abilities that make the louse so sought after. Travel the brothels that dot the main road running from the harbour to the shanty towns on the outskirts. Look for a single red light in a doorway, xxx painted in the windows. Some of these establishments offer sexual relations with louse-infested prostitutes.
The girl leads you to a private room. Her hands are warm and dry, slim and weightless as a child’s, but her touch is deliberate. She opens her mouth to reveal her treasure. The louse is white, pearly textured, the colour of baby teeth, of calf fat, of beeswax. Its mandibles dance, minuscule but incessant. The louse is hungry. It is ready. Tentacles deployed and undulating.
A rush of foreign words escapes the girl’s mouth as she wipes the spittle from her chin. The secretion produced by the louse is infamous, a supreme treasure; a liquid ecstasy. The girl reaches out her hand and touches your lips with it, softly brushes them. She pulls her hair back then goes down. You close your eyes and feel it run chest to navel. It lingers there. The louse wants to burrow. The girl has to pull it back. Not just yet….
Your hand is on her head, willing it down. She pauses, looks up at you, mouth gaping, the tongue-eating louse now fully erect, its body distended, segments wreathing. Yes. The word emerges from your lips like something you can taste.
The girl drops. She unbuttons your jeans, pulls them to your knees. Your cock is hard. It rises to greet the louse. Two creatures in a rapt encounter, touching. Its feelers skim your dick, they dance under your foreskin and lick the head. The louse slides downwards. Its legs are like thousands of tiny electrodes plugged into the shaft. It wiggles between your balls, curls and coils around them, rolls itself into a fist and squeezes. You can’t take it anymore. You grab hold of the girl’s head; thrust your dick deep in her mouth. She opens to take it. The louse is waiting to embrace you. It massages the shaft as you thrust deeper.
As you come, the girl slides backs to the tip. She takes it in the front of her mouth and the louse digs its way inside your crease, drinks your come; writhing in it, bathing in it. The feeling is like a lapping but from within, like something tapping the flow at its stem. You pull out and shake it off. Strings of cum lash the bedding, then a drop of something else, darker, staining the sheeting, spreading in a circle that loses its edges in the wet of the splatter.
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