The Dissident’s Tale

Epiphany Ferrell

 

Liana is at the stage of drunkenness where she is reciting the first few lines to Chaucer’s prologue to “The Canterbury Tales,” in Middle English, as she does sometimes. She can’t quite remember how it goes so she repeats the first six or so lines, pausing between recitations to aim at her mouth with her glass. She’s got salt on her upper lip and margarita on her chin and running down her left breast inside her open collared shirt. I was eager for intimacy at the beginning of the evening. Liana was at the flirtatious stage a few drinks back, and I hoped we might camp out in the backseat like teenagers. I wanted to lick away the salt, the sweet and sour stickiness of the margarita.

And then she started with the Chaucer.

“Wan that Aprill,” she begins again, trilling her “rrr.” She giggles. “Tingling,” she says.

“Aprirrrril. Aprrrril. My tongue. It’s tingling.” She laughs, helpless. “With hiss sure-ess soot-ah. Come on, say it with me.” I can. She recited it so often when she was memorizing the lines, when we were just roomies. I’m not even an English major.

“The droke-ta of Merch,” I say.

“Yeah, like that! Aprrrril!” She leans over the table at me, giving me an unavoidable look at her cleavage. “Is my tongue fuzzy?”

“Your tongue is not fuzzy.”

“It’s tingling. The droke-ta, where were we? Hath pear-said to the row-ta. Aprrril. It’s not tingling now.”

Outside this little bar, in rain-wet streets, havoc is brewing. Slowly. I don’t know what the demonstration is about this time. It’s always something. Sometimes I care, sometimes I don’t. I stay out of it. It’s always people who linger after the march and aren’t quite ready to go home, plus a few true believers, plus a few people looking for a party, and they meet a few true believers on the other side, and a few people with nothing better to do, and a few people who’ve never thrown a rock at a window before and want to try it. Maybe the leaders on both sides will round up their own, go home. Maybe the cops will show up and everyone will take fright and flight, or fright and fight. You can never tell this early.

“Liana, let’s go. We shouldn’t stick around here.”

“Gown on pill-gruh-ma-jis!” she announces. She grabs her glass and sloshes toward the door.

“You can’t leave here with that,” the bouncer tells her. His voice is soft, he’s trying not to make a scene. “Miss, you can’t …” He looks at me.

“Li, Liana, you can’t, you’ve got to finish it or leave it. Maybe leave it.”

Liana tries to focus. “Sarah, your lipstick is a mess. God, you shouldn’t go out like that in public.”

I try to take the glass from her, but she throws it into the street. It hits one of those who hasn’t made up his mind which side he’s on, hits him in the back of the head. He turns with venomous poise.

“To Canterbury!” Liana shrills. When she screams “Aprrrril,” it sounds like a war cry.

 

Epiphany Ferrell writes most of her fiction in Southern Illinois at Resurrection Mule Farm, so-named after a mule survived a lightning strike there. She received a Pushcart nomination in 2018, and her stories appear in various places, including Pulp Literature and New Flash Fiction Review.