The Little Green Mouth in My Brown Bedroom Carpet by Owen Townend

The vacuum had reached the corner of my bed when I heard a wail give out, immediately followed by a disapproving tut. Glancing down at the brown carpet from which it came, I identified a small green mouth with sharp little teeth. My whole body stiffened but what I felt most was the cool sticky sweat on my forehead.

             “I’ll talk!” the voice pleaded before repeating the phrase as a screechy threat.

            “Are you meant to?” I asked.

            The mouth closed at this, briefly thinking the matter over before stating, “I can do as I feel.”

            I didn’t know what to say to that so I answered, “Fair enough.”

            This seemed to invite the little green mouth to speak. So many words streamed out of it that I had no hope of understanding what was being said or what parts of it were important. Indeed the whole thing sounded like pure digression to me.

            Eventually though the mouth stopped to ask me a question: “When do you next meet with the king?”

            This gave me significant pause. “Sorry. King?”

            The mouth sighed. “The king you see twice every day. Unless your sister goes to see him first.”

            “You know my sister?” I imagined a brief and bizarre dialogue, involving her getting down onto her belly to discuss the day’s events with this carpet mouth. If anyone could give it a run for its money, it would be my chatterbox sister.

            “I see her enter the room from time to time but she never stops long enough to say hello. Then again she doesn’t run huge suck machines over me either.”

            I felt a pang of shame here though I really couldn’t say why. When my sister and I first rented this house we had never been warned about any kind of mouth in the carpet. Really the landlord should have admitted such details in the contract.

            “But that is beside the issue,” the mouth snapped. “When do you next see the king? Has the furry biped been made ready yet?”

            It took me a moment to realise that the mouth meant Chiquita, our Labrador Pinscher. She sometimes bursts into my room but normally I keep the door firmly shut as she can make a terrible mess when we leave her. Regardless it seemed the mouth had come across her at some point.

            “Chiquita?” I asked. “We don’t bring her to see a king.”

            “Really?” I didn’t appreciate the accusatory tone that the mouth took here. “You do not take this Chicky-tee outside every morning and afternoon to meet with the King of Dogwal?”

            I needed even longer to unpack this sentence. It eventually occurred to me that the King of Dogwal might also be referred to as The Dogwal King. Dog walking. I laughed.

            “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong idea here. We don’t take Chiquita to the Dogwal King, we take her dog walking. That is to say we walk the dog, which is Chiquita. Do you understand?”

            The little green mouth opened and closed, thin plastic lips quivering with indignity. At last it bore its teeth and snarled, “I have never been so insulted! I will report this to the authorities, maybe even the King of Dogwal himself! I take my leave of you now but, mark my words, you will come to regret mocking me!”

            Then the mouth closed up and sank beneath the fibres of the carpet. I stood there a while longer, calling out in case the mouth came back with some kind of retort. Nevertheless it stayed away and I vacuumed around the patch it had occupied.

            Though I watched for it when I went to sleep that night, the mouth didn’t reappear. Then, when I awoke the next morning from a patchy sleep, I dressed without any snide remarks catching me off-guard.

            It has been a week now and I don’t believe the little green mouth in my brown bedroom carpet will return. I don’t know precisely what authorities it sought out but it seems the matter has been resolved. Maybe the mouth has seen its error and is too proud to apologise. I get that way too sometimes.

Still I will be glad if I never see or hear from it again. This place is getting thick with dust.