{"id":3770,"date":"2022-05-02T15:12:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-02T15:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3770"},"modified":"2022-05-02T15:12:03","modified_gmt":"2022-05-02T15:12:03","slug":"tell-tale-tit-by-margo-lanagan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3770","title":{"rendered":"Tell-Tale Tit by Margo Lanagan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>Tell-Tale Tit<\/em><\/strong> by Margo Lanagan (<em>New Worlds<\/em>, 2022) is a short piece that begins with all of England\u2019s dogs being brought together to feed on the tongues that have been cut from the mouths of \u201ctattles\u201d (\u201cwomen, mostly, because telling tales has always been a woman\u2019s offence\u201d):<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>There is always some gentleman complaining in the parliament of the cost of this waiting, this gathering, this holding. Would it not be more efficient, he wonders, to take in smaller batches of tattles and of dogs, closer to the conviction dates, hard upon each assizes, and closer also to the district where the judgements are passed?<br>Whereupon other good sirs leap up to correct him: It is a <em>national<\/em> scourge, this betrayal, this calumny, and should be dealt with in a nationalised manner. The horror is not for the fact that a dog, any local dog, should have a taste of you, but that <em>every dog in England shall have his little bit<\/em>. A convicted tattle should never know whether any dog she meets thereafter contains a particle of herself. She has <em>become<\/em> dog, and that knowledge is brought home to her, not only by her silence but also by the sight of any representative of the creatures from wolfhound to lady\u2019s lap dog, forever after.\u00a0 p. 115<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>The rest is not much more than a (grisly) description of how offenders\u2019 tongues are surgically removed in the Cutting Hall, ground up, and then fed to the massed pack of dogs in the Distribution Hall (the narrator\u2019s job is to ladle out the minced tongue meat to the animals). While the dogs eat, the punished and the public watch on.<br>There is no story here, just a descriptive account of a bizarre practice\u2014but it is a striking and immersive piece for all that.<br>*** (Good). 2,750 words.<br><br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tell-Tale Tit by Margo Lanagan (New Worlds, 2022) is a short piece that begins with all of England\u2019s dogs being brought together to feed on the tongues that have been cut from the mouths of \u201ctattles\u201d (\u201cwomen, mostly, because telling tales has always been a woman\u2019s offence\u201d): There is always some gentleman complaining in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[897],"tags":[539,24,900,898,183,12,899],"class_list":["post-3770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-margo-lanagan","tag-539","tag-3-2","tag-crime-and-punishment","tag-margo-lanagan","tag-new-worlds","tag-short-story","tag-surreal-fantasy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3770"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3774,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770\/revisions\/3774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}