by Francies Stephenson

Yes, English is my first language 
I promise you I wrote all these words 
The tip of my tongue 
Just comes out a little further 
Than it should 
I’ve thought over a million times
About corrective surgery 
Just mark, slice, & stitch my tongue here 
But I don’t want to do that anymore 
For the ones with 
Lazy tongues 
Stutters 
Lisps 
Underbites and 
Overbites 
Open your mouths wider 
And vocalize those 
Dentalised, 
Lateralised, 
Palatalized, 
And nasalized sounds 
Orchestrate the World’s Greatest 
Speech Impediment Symphony 
Let’s make it fashionable 
To have difficultly pronouncing words with 
The letters 
S, T, D, Z, R, H, and B 
Let’s stop silencing our voices 
Out of fear of embarrassment
Let’s reject anyone who
Corrects our mispronunciation 
Let’s turn up on anyone who 
Mocks us 
Let’s write bestseller children stories and 
Young adult novels where
Protagonists have speech impediments 
Let’s hashtag our speech impediments 
I’ll start first #lisp202
That’s Lisp (202) for my speech impediment & my D.C. area code 
Let’s make professions out of having speech impediments 
Oooh, and it doesn’t stop there 
Let’s make an exclusive fan club and name it 
Speech Impediments Only!

by Ursula Vernon

Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

It used to be a problem.

There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up with parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold and gems fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

So I got frogs. It happens.

“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

Toads are masters of it.

I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

But I can make more.

I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.

It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

-Posted with permission 

Everyone would have agreed it was a shame that two weeks passed before Professor Flitwick realized why the child’s feather was failing to rise. “Louder, boy!” he instructed, when he finally reached the far left corner of the classroom to observe the student’s wandwork.

“Wingar——dium leviosa” the boy had said.

“Don’t pause in the middle, say it smoothly, like this.” Professor Flitwick demonstrated, the feather floating gracefully up a dozen inches then settling back to the desk. “Again!”

“W-w-w-ingar—-dium le-le-lev—-”

And that was when the professor had nodded in understanding and quickly ushered the child to the infirmary.

“No wonder he’s been so shy since he arrived, the poor thing’s ashamed to speak,” he explained to a bustling Madam Pomfrey. She shook three drops of Graphorn Gall onto the terrified boy’s tongue—expensive, but worth it for the permanent fix—flicked her wand twice and spoke the explicare charm. There was a quick red glow across his chin, and a loud pop that made him startle. The boy reached up tentatively to his lips.

“There, let’s hear you now.”

“Wingardium leviosa,” the boy said quietly.

“Ah ha! Very good,” exclaimed Madam Pomfrey. “Back to class, you’ll have those feathers flying in no time.” She escorted them out with a smile, placed her vial of Graphorn Gall back on the shelf, and proceeded to forget the incident entirely.

She wasn’t there to see the boy’s shy eyes when he greeted his parents at King’s Cross in December, his mother gasping at his free-flowing words, his father’s cheeks damp with pride. And many years later, when she noticed a former Head Boy return to Hogwarts with special permission to access the charms library, she could not have recalled their first meeting.

No one saw him alone in the guest quarters that night, pouring over ancient magical-reversal texts, muttering one incantation after another with wand pointed to his lips. “This is my voice,” he repeated quietly between each attempted spell. “This is my voice.” Another flick of his wand. “Th-th-this is my vvvvvoice.”

No, Madam Pomfrey was peacefully asleep after another day of mending the broken. She didn’t hear the man’s long, deep exhale, or see his bitter smile.


-Originally from livesandliesofwizards, reprinted with permission.