Weird Horror Magazine

Babelfish aren’t actually fish. Best to buy one a few weeks before your vacation, hold it in your mouth all throughout the day. It will settle there, bite away any remaining muscle, and take the place of your tongue. Sure, your words will slur, like talking ‘round a mouthful of marbles, but as the Babelfish gets used to the words, speaking becomes easier.

The TSA agent looks at your plane ticket, your passport, your face. You smile. The foreclaws of the Babelfish poke past your lips. “Have a pleasant trip.”

As soon as you step off the plane in Mexico, the Babelfish vendors crowd around you, holding woven baskets of squirming things. There are signs all over the airport warning about unsanctioned solicitors, please use the officially licensed booths. There’s no telling what the street sellers will give you to put in your mouth, and the booths have a better exchange rate. You take a sip from a bottle. The louse in your mouth loosens its grip and you spit it out into their bucket. The exchanger weighs and measures it. Developed, well-exercised. Lots of tongue-wagging, absorbed quite a bit of vocabulary.

He gives you a different Babelfish and you stick it to the stump of your tongue. When you speak with it, the new parasite squirms and twists your words into the language it was trained in. Now you are conversationally fluent in Spanish. Your original Babelfish, trained in English, will be sold to a bellhop or a cabbie, someone who needs it for their tourism-industry job.

At night, when you go out to the club, you negotiate flawlessly with the promoter to get the cover charge waived. You dance. The words to the songs come to your lips without thought. The way you shake your hips catches the attention of a local boy and he moves very close to you. You let him. You brush lips once during the chorus, then again in the crossfade to the next song. The beat grows louder but it can’t drown out the seduction of the boy’s hissing and rattling Babelfish louse in your ear. You kiss a third time and this time open your mouth. Your Babelfish grapples with his Babelfish, doing their mating dance. One of them is carrying eggs. You’ll take the egg sac back home with you. Customs officials in some countries confiscate foreign tongues at the border, to protect language purity.

But that is a worry for tomorrow, and this is tonight. He knows exactly the right things to say, doesn’t even have to think about it, just lets his wagging tongue do all the work. In your hotel room, the oral sex is intricate and novel: these Babelfish have been well trained in the swim upstream to spawning grounds. You gasp frequently, and curse creatively, and praise an unknown god.

In the morning, the boy gives you a deep kiss and says he’ll call you that night. But by the third day of your vacation, with only one night remaining in your reservation, you’re starting to get the hint, and you go out on the neon-lit strip alone, trawling, licking your lips as bait, catching stares and appreciatively lewd exposures in return.

It is while one of your catches tries fumblingly to tell you how beautiful you are that you see, over his shoulder, the boy from that night. He’s sitting in a dark corner of the club, has his tongue down some blonde girl’s throat, like a bird feeding a hatchling.

The night air does little to cool your fury as you stand in the alley and light a joint. The Babelfish sucks up most of the smoke that fills your mouth before you can. A voice calls from the shadows: an old woman with a rickety cart filled with buckets. “Love troubles?” she asks. “I have the thing.” She holds out a Babelfish the length and girth of an aubergine, lobster-segmented and lionfish-quilled. It waves its eyestalks at you, already trained in several love languages. “Want to be a man for the night? This will press all your buttons, and will serve him right.”

You say no.

She offers others. Larvae the boys put in their urethras, where they gradually swell and harden and engorge, wearing the penis like a glove, painfully sensitive to all touch. No. Or how about the bigmouth Babelfish that the boys let chew off and replace their manhood? Once the nerve grafts take root, it’s better than the real thing. No. Then the fanged cave-dweller that the girls put up inside, much to the regret of any uninvited boy.

“No,” you say. “I want to give him a piece of my mind.”

She makes a trade. The new thing in your mouth is black and foul-tasting. Its hard shell crawls with instars and curses. At the entrance to the club, it screams through its spiracles at the doorman and he hastily gets out of your way. You anonymously send drink after drink to the boy’s corner until he staggers off in the direction of the restroom. Then you follow.

He’s at the urinal when you enter and lock the door. He turns around, dick still in hand. “Hey, babe,” he says, limply. You see the truth on his face. He has two Babelfish in his mouth, both forking from the stump of his original tongue. He can speak two languages at the same time, can say different things, even conflicting things, simultaneously. He can suppress the movement of one or the other, can mix and match, can twist the meanings of words however he wishes.

You press against him, push him against the dirty wall. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” you say, and stick your tongue in his ear.

©️ Josh Pearce

Josh Pearce has stories and poetry in Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, IGMS, and Nature, and he frequently reviews films for Locus Magazine. Find more of his writing at fictionaljosh.com. One time, Ken Jennings signed his chest.