Stevens held up the tongue cradled in his hands, still sluggishly pumping blood at the root, offering Day a ghastly, lazy, almost erotic smile. Stevens’s tongue was usually so pink and dainty, sometimes seen when concentrating hard, or stuck out at the medical inspection with an air of insolence. Day had thought long and hard on that tongue, and how it would taste—wintergreen, he thought, but warm. The sort of warmth that would make everything else bearable. “The human mouth is filthy,” Valle had once said to him, tightly, but how could that be possible? Why was everything Day wanted
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