The Conversion Gag - Flash Fiction

There was ten feet of dead air between the two men. The air was dead since it seemed impermeable to communication between the pair. Yet it was not empty. For they were hurling imprecations towards one another, but in two different languages so that the precise meaning was not transmitted. The tone was clear enough to relay the hostile intent however.
The men’s bodies too were broadcasting. The fingers and shoulders were goading, inviting the other to squeeze the space between them, for body to fall upon body, while the legs were planted stiffening against any such anticipated onrush.
The motion was too fast to determine which of the men broke first, but what is certain was that the smaller of the two men darted in low at the level of the other man’s knees and brought him to the ground. While they wrestled, he was able eventually able to straddle his adversary and used one of his forearms to parry the blows of the man pinned beneath him. With his other hand he reached into his pocket and withdrew a rag. He then drove his braced arm to brush the other’s flailing punches aside to yield access to the man’s face. He impelled the rag at the man’s mouth which resolutely cut off its oaths and curses as he realised his foe’s intent and started chopping at the man’s ribs from his prone position. The man ignored the renewed onslaught, but started whistling as he wiggled his fingers trying to prise the man’s lips apart. The tune was recognised by the pinioned man as that of his own national anthem. He reflexively scowled at the affront and in that moment the gag was successfully nestled between his teeth stopping up his tongue.
Now his vituperations were muffled behind the deadening wall of fabric. His persecutor shushed him and placed a finger parallel to his distended stuffed mouth and tapped each of his cheeks in turn. It served as the first successful communication of the whole exchange. After a beat, he proceeded to talk in his alien tongue. To his amazement, the other man found he had begun to understand this language. The gag appeared to serve as some sort of translation membrane and its palpations on his tongue somehow beat out a Morse Code transfusing the message to his brain. He ceased his feeble hammerings on the man’s torso and concentrated on the interrogation being made of him.
There was a pause when his interlocutor stopped speaking but which the auditor hadn’t appreciated as the end of the speech. The squatting man jutted his face at him, soliciting a response. His captive audience slowly raised an arm and jabbed a finger at the gag impeding his mouth. The custodian again lightly tapped each of his cheeks, then ran his finger down to the man’s throat where he deliberately traced out a slowly descending path. He left his finger on the windpipe and dipped his head until one of his ears was resting against the gag. He raised his head, removed his finger and nodded. The subject furrowed his brow in confusion, but started giving his reply. If the man couldn’t understand his language in the first place because of its foreign derivation, the distortions wrought by the gag made this version seem wholly unearthly. But the man sat atop his victim unflustered and unblinking.
When the respondent had finished his piece, the superior man merely removed the gag from his mouth, flexed it once with a percussive whip and let it arrange itself into a vertical plane. The other man watched in quizzical silence, not comprehending what he was witnessing. The man brought the cloth to the horizontal, sat flush on his open palm. He then proceeded to incline into it and gave the impression of scanning it in great detail. The other noticed that his lips were moving, which suggested that he was reading something printed there. He couldn’t help himself, he softly cleared his throat and once he’d attracted the man’s attention, gestured for him to show him the cloth. The man obliged him and he saw that indeed there was some alphabetic script printed on the cloth. Somehow his spoken words had been absorbed by the cloth and inked in transliteration. He handed the rag back dumbfounded.
He wasn’t allowed to indulge his amazement for terribly long, since his subjugator having finished reading, his face was now clouding over. Clearly the response had not met his expectations. He rammed the cloth roughly into the man’s face, bevelling it until the victim could not but help part his lips. But the conqueror did not satisfy himself with just resealing the man’s mouth, but continued to thrust it down past the tongue into the man’s throat. He started choking as his glottal aperture was stopped up. Gagging on the gag. The man was hellbent on making the wretch eat his own words. Albeit in a foreign tongue.