One Day
Merca
One day, all words lost their taste, their shape and their smell, maybe their meaning along with that. They had lost their sound long ago, at the time when people started to feed artificial intelligence with them. It mumbled them first, then spat them out like mottled spitballs looking at the dull but happy-eyed faces of people. Like dogs waiting for food or a stick to be thrown and be brought back to the master. But there came a time when even more happened. Words had no time any more, they cleared off, but mouths did not catch up with them. They stood by the roads and tried to hitch-hike and follow, but there was no-one to pick them up.
And if some mouth happened to find a word, it tasted like polystyrene or a ball made of sawdust. There was no way to declare love with them, no way to express an opinion either. You couldn’t fudge poetry of them, novels tended to straggle like watery soup over your breast, happily leaving no smudges.
People tried to communicate using body language and using onomatopoeic noises. It was embarrassing and difficult to express feelings with them. Only anger sometimes got power as fists seemed to like body language. On the other hand, viciousness was also scarce because earlier mindless words tended to feed that feeling.
Numbers, quite naturally, did not disappear, one could compute as before, but without words, they had become dry and crunched sadly, crumbling like old crackers. If someone undertook some mathematical exercise in a park, the pavement was soon teeming with sparrows pecking at the crushed particles of number signs.
The situation became especially strained in government institutions. Attempts to put a law or an act on paper were miscarried: words scuttling away like ants, crawling like pale maggots on white paper fields. Go and catch them!
And songs disintegrated. Sentences thumped from under the staves down to the ground like dead seagulls. Melodies remained but without words they became bored, so they unhooked their small tails from the staves and felled themselves onto the ground. Bye and bye they grew roots there. Thus the notes became caroling crocuses, singing snowdrops, laughing lilacs, bellowing bluebottles. In spring people now used to gather at flowerbeds, listening and remembering something forgotten.
“Eeeee,” one said.
“Ssss,” another answered.
“Uuuu!” the third hooted.
But nobody noticed any meaning. It was nature that expressed itself in that way, but was it understood quite like that? Hardly.
Thoughts, however, didn’t disappear anywhere. They clogged up the brains and made heads thick, but it was impossible to express them. And so they jingled and jangled there, sadly swaying from one nook of the skull to another.
In libraries, fat rats wiped dust from the backs of the books with their tails. Those who understood were gone now. Books started chuckling when tickled, when the naked tails of the rodents stroked them, the pink little feet massaged their backs.
Some die-hards sometimes slipped in through the temple door, opening one or another book. They scrutinized the mysterious words, licked the pages, and smelled the sentences as snuff. But it was only the dust of the letters that made them sniff. Commas stuck between their teeth and it was unpleasant to get them out later.
Scratch as much as you will, but the comma has fastened its tail between the teeth. What’s more, the printing black’s taste is so unpleasant. No gourmet food at all, you know. At the same time, there were those who liked those old rancid words and punctuation marks. Stealthily, secretly at first, those people took books home. Somewhat later, finding kindred spirits, they formed word-eating societies, underground at first. Later, elite restaurants were opened, where you were given books to be licked for good money. Well, it depended on the book and endurance, too. Some people got dead drunk, losing memory after a few pages of a great classic, some dawdled at a novel the whole evening going home proud and straight. Next morning, those who’d lost their memories sat wordless at work, unable to do anything. The GDP of states started to fall steeply. The attempt of the governments to forbid book restaurants crashed heavily like against a concrete wall: a prohibition is made up of words! Committees were formed to work out the necessary signs.
Those suffering from word hangovers, licked anything in the morning to get rid of tremor and dizziness, to slip past with a soft step like in velvet slippers. Whenever a rag of text appeared, the greedy tongues were present. That licking a dirty word on a fence might threaten with a splinter in your tongue, did not matter a bit. Only to be rid of that pain! Trembling and chirruping in the head dug their way into the brain convolutions like worms in putrid cheese.
All at once the streets and squares were full of bored and angry housewives, bearing slogans with titles of literary works crossed out with red. Now the government reacted powerfully. All book restaurants were momentarily closed. And once again book burning piles were blazing on the streets. Indiscriminately this time. Everything having letters on it went into the fire, even very old bus tickets.
Some words must have survived somewhere as the word eaters who had just gone underground preserved something and at shady street corners indecent women offered word licking service, using a certain gesture.
Was there any profit from the disappearance of words? Certainly. Wars stopped for if you don’t understand, it is impossible to react upon commands.
Translated by Kersti Unt