Utter

Think before you speak, he would say, glaring over the table to make it clear. And besides not another word out of you until you eat your beans. 



But this was a trap, because the beans, she knew, would make her gag, she couldn’t help it, these garden beans were somehow hairy and slimy both and she was never able to swallow them. And when she gagged, he would rage and send her from the table, demand she apologize, and she would never have said the thing she’d needed to say, that she could have said if only she’d been able to talk it out a minute longer. The thought in her throat a kind of inverse of the way the beans felt, something she had to get out or she’d choke.