hailey's raze somehow i got it in my head that her name was hailey. i thought of her lisp as hailey's lisp. but it wasn't. it was justine's lisp. what happened was her parents waited too long to wean her off her pacifier. she still had it in her mouth when she was six years old. her brown eyes looked as big to me as the blue circle of silicone that hid her lips. her top two front teeth moved a little too far apart. maybe they were always going to do that. she developed a lateral lisp. every voiceless alveolar sibilant came out thicker and with more tongue behind it than she meant for it to have. her name was the feminine form of justin. it meant just. fair. but i never heard her say a kind word to anyone once that dry nipple left her mouth. even her smile looked like a taunt. her parents rented a karaoke machine once. i sat on their basement floor and sang "back in the u.s.s.r." and "can't help falling in love", staring at an old brown tv screen, reading words i already knew by heart. they used the UB40 version of "can't help falling in love" as a template. i still sang it like elvis. i wanted to sing another beatles song. i settled on "michelle". but they transposed that one into a different key, and i couldn't work out the bridge section on the fly. "you're a bad thinger," justine said. i listened to her miss every note she tried to hit when she sang some artless love song i'd never heard before, her legs folded up like she was trying to make them disappear. i decided if the sounds she made were supposed to be good, i was okay with living at the other end of the spectrum. at least my name wasn't a lie. 220211 what's it to you? who go blather from