by J.M.C. Kane
Borrowed Mouth
I learned to apologize by reading footnotes instead of the room.
This is not entirely true, but it explains more than the other versions. The other versions involve a locker room, a borrowed mouth, and the sudden realization that everyone else had been given a script and I had been handed a receipt.
In the book, the heroine steals a body. Literally. She opens it like luggage and wears it to dinner. Everyone compliments her posture. No one asks where she got the scars.
I tried that once—stealing a body. It didn’t fit. The hips argued with me. The voice kept slipping out at the wrong moments, saying things like sorry and thank you, which ruined the effect. Power requires bad manners.
By the way, the first time someone called me difficult, I thought they meant complicated. I didn’t understand it was a warning.
There is a scene where our heroine’s mother dies. This happens because mothers always die in books like this, preferably offstage, preferably without explanation. I underlined the sentence where no one cried and wrote in the margin: good. Then I crossed it out and wrote: liar.
Sex happens. Of course it does. It is described incorrectly. Teeth appear where they shouldn’t. Time reverses. Consent is negotiated with mirrors. Someone narrates while bleeding. Someone else keeps asking if this is political, as if it could be anything else.
Language breaks. That’s the point. Grammar gets fucked first. Pronouns wander off. Plot files a complaint and is ignored. There is a paragraph that consists only of a list of stolen names. I take one and try it on. It bruises.
I
we
she
he
it
it
it
me, my name—don’t steal that one. I can’t afford to lose it too.
See?
At the end, the narrator escapes by becoming unreadable. This is presented as failure.
I laughed. Because nothing scares authority more than a body that refuses to stay in the sentence.
And if you are reading this, I have already popped
you
out of the frame.
Don’t mistake this for an apology.
I’m done.
Author J.M.C. Kane is an autistic writer and environmental attorney in New Orleans who specializes in very short works because it gives him fewer opportunities to wander off-topic. He has been a paper carrier, a contracts executive, and briefly the caretaker of a stray theory about how objects remember us. His fiction has appeared in journals that appreciate compression—and his willingness to obey word counts.
Artist Tendai Rinos Mwanaka is a multidisciplinary artist, editor, publisher and producer with over 70 individual books and curated anthologies published in US, Northern Ireland, UK, Cameroon and Zimbabwe. He has 4 music albums, with new album, The Choice is not Mine (2024) recently released and his music is playing in at least 18 radio stations in US, Canada, UK, France, Israel, Brazil and Australia. He has produced hundreds of paintings and drawings, thousands of photographs, some exhibited, published and sold, with latest exhibitions in 2026 at 13b gallery, Slovenia, Herri, South Africa and Fox Yard Studio, UK. His pieces have also appeared in over 500 journals in over 35 countries and his books and writings are translated into at least 11 languages. His music can be licensed here: https://www.songtradr.com/tendai.mwanaka. Find him here: https://m.facebook.com/tendai.mwanaka
Gulf Stream Magazine 