Free A Stolen Tongue by Sheri Holman Page B

view, a golden head with a surprised glass-fronted mouth, through which we may view the tongue. My turn comes to venerate it, and in my heart I offer up this prayer:
    Like a tiny blind mouse, dear tongue, you struggled in the mouth of our infant saint. Quivering and straining, you woke her first words, rolling them off their pink, muscular bed and into theworld. Shyly, you reached out for your first taste of cold melon, sadly forgot the flavor of mother’s milk. You, tongue, recited pagan rhymes, thrust yourself at naughty pagan boys, licked the sweat that gathered on our saint’s upper lip when she sprinkled incense before the pagan gods.
    A stone in her mouth the night her father, Good King Costus, died; a wrung sponge, barely wetting her lips by her third day in the desert, taken there to learn the ways of our Lord by Saint Sabba. You tasted no flesh but her elder’s webbed knuckles, no liquid but tears heated on the portal of her sunburned lips. A straining, yearning fourteen-year-old tongue against the cheek of her bridegroom, the baby Jesus, when he slipped a ring on her finger and sent her back to Alexandria.
    For four years, you issued proclamations and exalted the poor, until the Emperor arrived to survey his vassalage. You, tongue, hesitated not in your answer to Emperor Maxentius; no, you touched the roof of her mouth, slid behind her teeth.
I will not renounce my husband, Jesus Christ. I will not sprinkle incense before your pagan gods.
    The Emperor followed you in your route around her mouth, watched you pause at each station of thought on your pilgrimage of refusal. He wanted so badly to take you between his lips that he sometimes felt his own mouth open and close softly, like a baby dreaming of its mother’s tit. He challenged Saint Katherine further, merely to watch you savor your retort. Poor kidney-colored tongue of his wife, the Empress; the Emperor sought to replace it with you, offering Katherine his wife’s place at his side for one handful of incense on an altar. Again, a slight tap to the roof of the mouth. No.
    Could not fifty philosophers convince her?
    You humiliated and pleasured them, first in defeat, then in conversion.
    Could not torture—the Wheel, starvation—silence her?
    No, you gave to God a new song, lapped nectar from the palms of angels.
    Lop off her breasts, roared the Emperor, but don’t touch her tongue!
    Where could you rest in her rictus mouth? Could you have possibly found an idea to go with the pillows that dropped from her chest? But good came from evil: Queen Kidney Tongue was converted; jailor Porphyrius, the thousands in the square come to cheer their patroness, were converted and instantly martyred.
    And when in his reddest rage, standing in the stubble field of severed limbs, the Emperor struck her head from her shoulders, his guards had to restrain him from sucking the dirt and grainy milk from your still quivering flesh. He fought hard. He had to know how Christianity tasted.
    Bless me, O tongue.
    In Jesus’ name. Amen.
    The priest stands by, while I fog the glass with my reverent kiss, and wipes it after me.
    When we are done, we retire to the shaded pleasure garden, there to open our scrips and eat some lunch. Conrad, our barber, takes out a little reed pipe he has lashed together and plays festively for our entertainment.
    â€œMy brothers and pilgrims,” I say, rising when all are sprawled under pine boughs and lunch is nearly finished, “I have prepared a profitable sermon on how compares this Mount of Venus to that of holy Mount Sinai: their likenesses and divergences, their places in history, and their accompanying miracles. I call this sermon Truth and Illusion. Would you like to hear it?”
    â€œHear, hear!” cries John, waving his water skin. “If we are to bear the heat of the afternoon, how better to weather it than with a sermon?”
    Conrad pipes a little arpeggio signifying assent, and Constantine