Languish

By Kendall Poe

/ Flash /    

Councilmembers made an announcement on Tuesday. Their town, once halcyon, now monotonous, would have a sale on words so that anyone of means could buy their preferred set of syllables. It marked the beginning of great change and self-identification. They hoped to encourage the commerce and conversation that would fend off a stagnation that grew like mildew.

Not since the last war had there been so much redefining. The young couple who had owned Meticulous no longer wanted order and instead stretched their budget for Catastrophe. Troy tapped the glass of the display case above Pontification, as if to wake it from deep sleep. He didn’t have the money, but—five syllables? People who coveted Righteousness often bought Martyr for a bundle. Inimitable, Happenstance—the more syllables, the more value and the better it looked atop a mantle. 

The sale took place on Sundays. Merchants traded their jars of pickles, bundles of goat cheese, racks of wool sweaters, or bouquets of dried flowers for stacks upon stacks of words. Like plucking the feathers from a chicken, books were gutted, and their entrails displayed across card tables. Adjectives, adverbs, proper nouns, abstract nouns. Townspeople navigated the booths by map. If it rained, and it often did, vendors carefully covered the words with tarp to avoid waterlogged letters. U’s, W’s, and V’s collected whatever you spilled into them like greedy little buckets. 

Everyone clamored to own Continental or Coincidental. Edgar the barber bought Precision to ward off accusations that he had finally lost his touch. Tiffany had a nameplate necklace with Ubiquitous stamped in gold. She didn’t quite know the definition but liked the way its weight kissed her collarbone every time she leaned over to tie a shoe. Committed individuals stenciled letters on their bicep or calf muscle. GRAVITAS. One hundred thousand pricks of a needle to let the world know how serious they were. 

Carlos didn’t care to own words. He hid his rebellion in letters to loved ones no longer living, slid the envelopes into the ground like everywhere was a mailbox if you just looked at it right. 

I miss you 

I wish we still spoke 

or further yet, 

I’m good at parallel parking. 

Slumped at the edge of the market in the least muddy spot she could find, a homeless woman watched the industry. 

“Who buys words?” she muttered. The rain reinforced her, and she didn’t have to say it twice—no one was listening. Hours later, a passerby tossed Languish into her paper cup. 

People carried words with them until their fingers could barely wrap around a pencil to write them down. Still, words sat in a reservoir of the hippocampus—treasures for another day. If you couldn’t write it, then you said it, confident that its significance resonated in whichever ear canal caught it or tongue repeated it. 

Many years later, the widow Cynthia had her family over—two first-marriage granddaughters, Jennifer and Diane, too fickle to know what to do with an elderly woman who could no longer speak. The granddaughters had tattoos of short words like Dream and Hope that peaked out from below the straps of their tank tops. Short was now fashionable. Their grandmother didn’t understand. She tried to adopt the all-knowing kindness that other grandmothers had in spades, but her progeny annoyed her. They were nothing like Cynthia as a young woman. What did Hope have to do with the quotidian accounting of every little detail? Why Dream? These words, they were empty plastic bags. It reminded Cynthia of when their family got its first computer. These same granddaughters, no more than three at the time, would bang their open palms on the keyboard and marvel at what popped up. They could’ve chosen Buxom, Moxie, Panache—all shorter than what Cynthia liked but with personality, at least. After all she’d done to survive and even flourish in this town. Cynthia hadn’t been rich, but she had made sure that she could afford some words—Loquacious, at one point. And it had made her happy to say because she had been, in fact, a talker. Low-quaish-us. Cynthia had presented her word at dinner parties as evidence that she was incredibly self-aware, and who didn’t appreciate a self-aware person? 

Her first husband, miserly and vindictive, had set to work on her words, tinkering at their form when she wasn’t looking so that they were misshapen and misunderstood. Then the second husband swooped in to fix them with his weathered wrench. Despite his intentions, he treated her like a project, not an adult. Only her third partner had understood and coveted everything she said like it was the elixir to immortality, God rest his soul.  

Grandmother looked at granddaughters. They hadn’t expected conversation, but when their grandmother opened her mouth, they leaned in. How long had it been? They waited while she opened and closed her mouth, a machine that needed recalibration. Cynthia felt the syllables in her mouth like a hard piece of toffee that had melted to her teeth and began to fuse her mouth shut. How many times had she said this word before? Her tongue pressed against the roof of her mouth, but her lips wouldn’t move. She couldn’t get over the hump of the first syllable. La-La-La. It was like trying to turn over the ignition of a car. Each attempt amounted to nothing. 

“What do you think she’s trying to say?” Jennifer asked. They glanced at each other, then fixed their eyes on their grandmother. The widow let them scan her insides like a metal detector. Any second now and they would see what she wanted to say. And that was all Cynthia wanted in that moment—for her family to acknowledge that she possessed something other than Old, Widow, and Grandmother. Loquacious, Loquacious, Loquacious, she chanted in her mind. 

“Love,” Diane said finally. “I think she’s trying to say she loves us.”