The Violence of Displaced Reference

What happened here could not have been prevented. Our language had become an abattoir, each word a fallen calf. The terms we so desperately needed had been taken from us. We were doomed from birth—our obscene futures traced in blood on the slick walls of forgotten concrete structures. When they came for us, we understood this. Acquiescence had been bred into us, though its wiring would begin to fray. And so we went without protest, for we knew no other choice. We saw only what had been foretold on those walls.

In the dimly lit catacombs, we shuffled down dusty halls, pushing our brooms past the guards posted at each door. The overseers warned us of what was to come, but we grew tired of hearing their words. At night, in my cell, I knelt with my head between my legs, afraid but also numb, so numb. We had become, what is the word...desensitized. Yes, we had become desensitized to their warnings. And this, in turn, would one day save us.

Words shed their menace over time. By the time I’d reached the age I was then, kneeling in that cell, I’d heard many words. I no longer feared any of them. I had heard them repeated too many times, and what they pointed toward never came to pass. I was still afraid of what might lie beyond the words, at the border of what was familiar, but I did not fear the words themselves.

We learned to listen to the spaces between their words and—despite their attempts to mask it—the unease in their voices. They thought they were fooling us with their harsh tone, but we studied the fear encysted within it. We dared not let on that we had noticed. For they still held the phonic keys, and the ones who held those keys made the decisions. Those decisions affected us to our core. And we did not want to ever again alter any course of action to work against our favor.

At night years later, I continue to write the beginnings of these stories too puzzling to finish. Or perhaps there are no conceivable endings to them, only the void that yawns open when no more words will come. How can one write an ending when there is no way to imagine it? No words to describe the monstrosity of an unknown future? I cannot see a way out of these situations I feel compelled to conjure. With music, a song can reach a conclusion without much effort. It spends itself—flares up and burns out. But these stories keep growing odd appendages—extra limbs that, when hacked off, leave gaping holes in the text. I mop up the dark fluid that leaks out and begin again, stuffing more words in to staunch the flow.

When a massacre took place in the courtyard, the screams were met only with silence. No one ventured to intervene. We believed our silence was perceived as apathy, and that this apathy told them we were stronger than they thought, that we operated as one and could wait them out, however long was necessary. If each party thinks the other is hiding fear beneath the cover of disinterest or bravado, one party must crack in time. We were desperate enough to believe we could see fissures growing in the willpower of our overseers.

I pull out my notebook in yet another futile attempt to capture the agony of those who swept alongside me. I’ve tried cutting the words out into sharp triangular slivers and stabbing them into my skin to test their lethality. The edges of the pages yield narrow cuts that spit tiny bulbs of blood, but it’s not the same. I need the words themselves to inflict the pain. I need a sentence to wield as a dagger, to stab the hands that fail to write without fear. I need to smother life out with the weight of a paragraph, but it’s not working. The words liquefy and spread across the page, passive in their banality and refusing to grow teeth. They pool together and run off like rank liquid down a rusted drain.

One day we looked at each other and laid down our brooms. As one, we attacked the nearest guard and rushed outside, across the courtyard toward the fence. There were no words left to speak, never mind to write. Mute, we fought with whatever lay within our grasp. As the gate slid shut along its track, someone jammed the control box, leaving only a narrow gap. I ran toward it with a scrap of sheet metal held up as a shield. I felt blades slice my flesh without pain. Blood poured down my face, turning the sunlight red in my eyes. And suddenly: we were beyond their reach.

In this present, my vocabulary returns in stuttered steps. The words feel foreign in my mouth and at the tips of my fingers. I slide them around my teeth, tonguing their syllables, feeling for sharp edges before I choose to release them into the wild. I grieve over the ones we lost, those fallen calves stunned and slaughtered. Our language is now a fragile settlement for the broken and dispossessed. I welcome each lost word as it reaches our borders, offering respite and a chance to reclaim agency. These refugees all wish to reenter our fold and gather into phrases. Perhaps a future does exist where our speakers will once again roam the land and speak our truth.