Tongue Kissing Sallie Mae
I imagine Sallie Mae sitting in her home office behind a pair of quarter inch thick reading glasses. A beam of sunlight is coming through a gap in the blinds and her pale skin is sizzling. She scratches the now reddened blotch. It peels off the way a snake sheds its skin. A thin lamination of wrinkles, warts, scabs, scars, and hair peels down to her elbow and finally plucks free. The new skin underneath is youthful and pink in color, but upon closer examination still holds the deep fault lines of old age. Sallie belches. A servant runs over and dabs her chin for spittle. The servant doesn’t make eye contact, nor is she allowed to. Quickly, she’s shooed away with a limp wristed wave.
Her hair is gray and thinning. The evidence of hair loss is sucked away by a fleet of autonomous vacuum cleaners which run twenty-four hours a day. The narrow, black, turtle-like objects perform their duties with precision, until Sallie Mae enters the room. Maybe it’s a matter of energies, maybe they’ve been customized to smell her vampiric pheromones – whatever it is puts the fear of god into these self-governing cleaners. When Sallie Mae is around, they wince like abused puppies. They tuck their tails and find dark corners. They scramble under table cloths and flip helplessly onto their backs. Inside their bellies, compartments overflow with fragile gray hairs with splitting ends. The hairs sit in a miniature catacomb of dead skin scales, feasted on by mutated dust-mites. The dust-mites eyes’ are red and belligerent like a pair of cigarette butts rolling closer and closer to a field of dry brush. At the end of each week, when the servants empty the vacuums, an entire dumpster is filled with this cremated version of spaghetti and meatballs. The contents are then shipped to a factory and stored in canisters meant for nuclear waste.
They’d like you to believe she’s beautiful. They’d like you to believe she was once a southern bell, now gracefully aged, with grandchildren. Sallie Mae sounds like a woman you’d drink sweet tea with. She’d bring you an extra slice of pie after lunch and you could eat it without first sniffing for poison. But that’s not the case.
Sallie Mae has fangs. She has long fingernails, painted black, and raw sewage underneath them. She spends all day in an office in the southern wing of her estate. The blinds are drawn to shield her paper thin skin from the sun. The desk is made entirely of ivory. The carpets are done up wall-to-wall with polar bear pelt. In the corner there’s a sofa made of golden retriever, the soft pillows stuffed with albatross feathers. It’s a grand room with a peculiar stink to it. The ceilings are high. The walls are lined with mounted heads. One after another, not replicas, but actual human heads prepared professionally by taxidermists.
The design of mounted heads continues throughout the entire estate. The upper perimeter of each room studded with face after helpless face, all of them college students. Poor, lost, confused. Their glass eyes stare wearily out at one another. Beneath them, gold tiles are inscribed with a dollar sign and a number amount. Each night, when Sallie is wheeled to her sleeping quarters, the heads are removed and exchanged for fresh faces. New tiles are engraved by hand and hung just so.
For a young kid going away to college, you hear a name like Sallie Mae and you don’t think anything of it. She sends out letters like Christmas cards. Little, benign, congratulatory notes on being accepted to an institution of higher education. She’s got a designated servant who sprays each letter with a spirt of perfume. Fresh baked cookies are laid to cool atop the envelopes. The letters are individualized, trifolded, and tucked neatly into the sugary scented envelopes. Then, Sallie Mae comes along to finalize the deal. She rubs her rough hands together, licks her lips, runs her venomous tongue along the edges and seals them shut.
That’s all it takes. Those kids won’t hear another word from her, not for some time. They’ll go on with prerequisites and electives. They’ll switch majors, add courses, drop courses, pass, fail, graduate. None of that matters. Not to Sallie Mae. The kiss of death has already found its mark. Each year those cells, the battalion of bacterially infected cells from her toxic saliva on that harmless little envelope, those cells multiply in the host. They mutate and stir into a potent concoction.
Four years and six months later, to the day, the poison becomes active. A signal is sent. I’m not sure the mechanism, but some electric shock, a little zap comes up through Sallie Mae’s desk chair. That little zing of electricity zaps the old wench right on her gelatinous ass cheeks. She immediately picks up the phone.
Some poor, probably jobless, student’s cellphone and email buzz simultaneously. The message comes through:
“I BELIEVE YOU OWE ME SOMETHING.”
There’s an emoji of a winking face with the tongue stinking out next to a few dollar signs. The message ends with an ominous salutation.
“-Forcibly yours,
$allie Mae”
