Elijah Sparkman
Summer 2024 | Prose
Chew
That’s the day when I got upset with mosquitoes and decided to bite them. At first people thought it was weird. I would be at a party and the people at the party would think I was weird. But it didn’t stop me. I flung my head through the air and I bit that bitch. I got it on my first try and the mosquito tasted crazy. Like blood and guts. Which isn’t all that surprising, but oftentimes you never really know about a thing until you have a real tactile in the flesh experience with it. So I bit it and I’m chewing and I go to the bathroom to make sure no one can see it and hey no one was looking so I used the host's waterpik and I cleaned my mouth in a way it had never been cleaned before. I went back outside with my clean mouth and then I bit another mosquito again, first try. A partygoer said, How did you do that so well? I said, I’ve been practicing at home. The partygoer said, Touche. I went back to the bathroom, locked the door, and this time used the host's toothbrush. It was a good toothbrush, but it was also non-electrical. I hadn’t used a non-electric toothbrush in some time. More than five years and less than ten. That’s when my host knocked on the door. My host is also my boss. And my host is also the President of the United States. I’m part of the Secret Service. I can’t tell you my real name, but I can tell you most people call me Mouth, all one word. And they called me that before I started biting back. He pounded again. He said it was an emergency. I opened the door. His toothbrush in my hand. He said, Aliens have just invaded the country. And then he said, What, what are you doing? Mouth, how could you?
Elijah Sparkman is the Detroit Program and Volunteer Coordinator for 826michigan, a youth writing organization. He is a member-owner of the cooperatively-owned bookstore, Book Suey, in Hamtramck, MI. He is a Teaching Artist for The Moth and a Memoir Reader for Split Lip Magazine. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Sleepingfish XX, Maudlin House, HAD, CHEAP POP, BULL, and The Museum of Americana. He is a graduate of Northern Michigan University's MFA program, where he was a Flash Fiction Editor for Passages North.