THE TURQUOISE PEN

SUZIE'S BIG MOUTH

Noël R. King

Suzie was sure her mouth was getting bigger. First she laughed privately to herself, but then when she was able to take bigger and bigger bites of her apple every time she ate one, she started having to face the real truth.

Her mouth was getting bigger and bigger. And bigger and bigger. Soon she could shove in whole slices of pizza with one bite and pieces of pie in just two (she couldn’t bear to have her beloved pie all gone in just one bite, although she could have done it easily enough).

Weirdly, though, nobody else seemed to notice, much to Suzie’s relief. She didn’t want anybody to know how voracious she was feeling as her mouth grew bigger and bigger. She couldn’t seem to help herself, how hungry she was all of a sudden. The bigger her mouth grew, the hungrier she felt.

Oh, I am so hungry! she kept thinking, and now her thoughts seemed to echo, what with all the expanse in her head now from that ever-enlarging mouth, so she felt even hungrier.

At first, as she kept eating more and more, the bigger her mouth got, and the more her thoughts echoed and clanged around in her brain, but it didn’t seem to fill her up. Strangely enough, she didn’t even gain any weight. In fact, she actually began looking a bit gaunt, if you looked closely enough.

As you can imagine, this got to be a very frustrating time for Suzie, and rather frightening as well. I mean, where would it all end?

Then one day, as Suzie was miserably eating an entire bag of potato chips on her way home from work, she stopped her car alongside the road to throw her empty potato chip bag into a nearby trashcan.

As she turned to head back to her car, she suddenly saw a red-tailed hawk soaring higher and higher into the late afternoon sky. She forgot all about her mouth for a minute as she watched the bird fly, reveling endlessly in the freedom of the space in which it lived.

She gulped. Then she swallowed again, only this time she swallowed the scene whole. She got her whole mouth around it.

"Oh my," she said. "That felt good."

And just like that, Suzie filled up her life.

—As circumstances warrant, through her column Noël R. King, Reston, Virginia, reports on strange and wonderful things, including mouths and what they swallow.