She was sitting on the back porch. She could see the yellow moon rising up between the branches of the pecan tree. Here, things were different. She had grown up on the edge of a desert so dry that it had cracked, split, and broken under her feet. This place was a swamp, its very foundation sinking into the earth as she slept upon it. It was hard to describe what it was like. She hadn't found the words for it yet. Already, she was forgetting how she used to talk, the manner by which she had once communicated, the language she had believed capable of saying what she had meant. All that had been supplanted by the sound of ships wailing on the renowned river, the plaintive cry of the coming trains, the screaming cicadas in the yard's night-darkened bushes. Every day, she walked along the train tracks until the train came upon her, banging and crashing, and, for the first time in her life, she felt the world eclipse her. One day, she would open her mouth and see what fell out on the floor in front of her. She'd have an entirely new vocabulary, composed of letters so clear they made misunderstanding impossible, sentences stuffed with perfect sense, punctuation rife with true significance. On this next page of her life, she would lose herself in the gaps between the words, climb all over the alphabet, hang herself upside down from the top of an I, her arms flung overhead like a stripper in a nightclub who believes, above all else, she is the center of the world. She got up and went inside. In the bathroom, she stood at the mirror, her mouth wide-open, in search of her own native tongue.
"What She Was Trying to Say" appeared in Issue No. 2 of
2GQ
