Shortly after the house took its last breath, Orange Traffic Cones arrived and the hospital followed. The Cones put on crash helmets, climbed ladders, and cut the house down; he landed on the lawn with the terrible sounds of wood splintering and glass smashing. The hospital tried to resuscitate him, but he was dead as a word.
Eventually, the Cones started collecting their tools and talking about where to go for dinner. As I stood in the blood-sopped grass, the hospital approached me wearing a house-sized stethoscope around his neck. The hospital lit a four-foot cigarette and said, “There wasn’t anything I could do, .”
“I know,” I said.
“You can’t blame yourself.”
“Who else is there to blame?” I said.
The hospital took a drag. “That’s a good question,” he said.
A few minutes later, the Cones’ and hospital’s walkie-talkies started trilling and squawking, and they all left for another call. I stood alone with the dead house, its blood blackening the page. The end.
~ Fini ~
Memory of the Reader: Wait.
What.
Memory of the Reader: What happened next? What’s the rest of the story?
That’s the end of it.
Memory of the Reader: But where did you go?
I didn’t go anywhere. It was late. I went inside and fell asleep.
Memory of the Reader: You slept in the corpse of the house?
Sure. What was I supposed to do?
Memory of the Reader: Sleep on the page?
And get carried off by a wild sentence, pulled into another bookwormhole? No, thank you.
Memory of the Reader: I’ve never heard of anyone doing that—sleeping in a deadhouse.
People do it all the time. My father was born in a deadhouse.
Memory of the Reader: What was that like?
Shrug. The rooms had gone gray, the house’s dreams silence and soil. New questions roamed from room to room.
Memory of the Reader: Such as?
Yeah, among others.
For a while I just lay there, listening. Then I prayed to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed and told him I needed help.
With what? he prayed back.
Digging a hole, I prayed.
A hole? he prayed. I should borrow some shovels, then?
Yes, I prayed. The biggest you can find.
CHIVER’S DELIGHT
That was in 1993, when language in Appleseed berserked, flabbergasted, broke free of its shackles for good. It began mutating, for one thing. All of a sudden—how do I say this?—the language got bigger.
No, not bolder, per se. Literally, bigger.
I think it started when the Daily Core printed a story about wild sentences troughing on the shore of the Kellogg River. That wouldn’t have been news normally, but these sentences were big—six feet high, one source told the Core; ten, another said. Creepy, right? But hey, odd shit happened all the time in Appleseed. Clouds wore hats. Every so often your shoes died on your feet. Sometimes you were attacked by the glasses on your face. And once or twice a year we felt a great shadow overhead, and looked up into the sky to see a page turning.
Soon, giant language started appearing everywhere. I was riding the Bicycle Built for Two one day, me on the front seat, Sentence on the backseat, when—plak! I hit—something—and I flew over the handlebars and landed on my side.
“I am.” came crashing down on me. “ ‘My tooth!’ he shouted, painfully,” said Sentence.
I looked at “I am.” There was blood dribbling from his m.
I lumbered back up the road to see what I’d hit. There, in the middle of the street, was a giant black comma. It was about three feet high, and it was—
Was it—snoring?
Yes! It was so fat that it had gotten tired crossing the street—it was taking a nap right there in the road.
“What the—” said “I am.”.
Soon, you could see these gigantic characters everywhere in Appleseed: ten-foot-high exclamation points loitering at the intersection of Colton and Shay; a 7 and a lowercase e ripping Harleys down Grassy Gutter; errant periods frowning all through town, stopping Appleseedians in their tracks.
Not long afterward, phrases and sentences began camouflaging into the page. You’d be right along, just like always, when and . And even though most Appleseedians looked at language as a threat, and no one particularly minded the , it was still odd that . And that, on a warm summer day, there was no at your feet or whimpering outside your window.
We were all miffled. Miffed. Hiffled. We weren’t sure what we could say, or what it meant. What if the meaning changed after we said it? We’d lost control of the story. The Orange Traffic Cones didn’t have any choice, I guess, but to allow the Mothers to increase their monitoring of language. First, they tried restraining the words physically—using parentheses, and when that didn’t work, brackets of various styles—but to no avail.
So the Mothers ordered the Orange Traffic Cones to close the borders: no language was to leave or enter Appleseed. To better regulate our words and their uses, Cones built checkpoints all around town: on Highway Five, at Samsa Avenue, near the worryfields. Everywhere you went you had to wait in line to show a Cone your words. New bans were issued every day: exclamation points were cut, then metaphors, then commands. For a while, periods were banned and every sentence had to end with a question mark. I remember once going to Bagel Beagle during the period ban and trying to order a sandwich. When I placed the order, though, I had to do so in a question: “I’d like a turkey sandwich?”
“Would you?” said the beagle behind the counter.
“On a bagel?” I said.
“Yes?” said the beagle.
“Yes?” I said.
“You would?” said the beagle.
“Yes I said?” I said.
“Are you asking me if you said that?” said the beagle.
“No?” I said.
“You’re not sure?”
“No I am?” I said.
“You’re asking me what you are?” the beagle inquired.
As a temporary fix, people stopped talking and suspended all prayers. Some people used sign language or Morse code; others invented complicated gestures. If you couldn’t find a way to express yourself, you just stored the question in your cheeks or swallowed it down.
We could only go so long without speaking, though; soon people were praying again, and then whispering, and then talking at full volume. Then a rally for words was held on the Town Green. “Go words!” chanted the hundreds in attendance. “Words rock!”
Select Cone Johnson took the podium and promised that he and the Board would find a way to “take back our words.” Starting tomorrow, he announced, Cones would start searching every home in Appleseed. “We’ll omit these words and phrases from every page,” he shouted, and the crowd applauded.
And I remember seeing the story about it in the next day’s Core—the pictures of Cones kicking in doors, carrying out armfuls of expressions, handcuffing those sentences and stuffing them into the backs of cone-shaped cars. Words that tried to hide, the article said, would be immediately demeaned. When one expression tried to run? A Mother killed that sentence on sight.
When I read that story, I knew what I had to do. How long would it be before the Cones came knocking on our door? I didn’t have a choice—there was only one option. The very next morning, I woke at first light and lifted the sheet off of “I am.” ’s cage. He was curled up in the corner, snoring. I unhooked the latch, opened the door, and lifted the words out. I wrapped Sentence in my coat and carried him upstairs and outside. We crossed the street and walked through the worryfield, then into the trees and toward the Appleseed border. There were deadwords—I remember “candelabra,” “phosphate,” others—here and there, and sentence-trails criss-crossing through the brush. As we ran along the path I scanned the trees for any sign of a sentry or guardcone—anything bright orange
or cone-shaped—but I didn’t see any; the woods looked clear.
A few hundred feet from the border I stopped, knelt down in the darkness, put Sentence on the wet earth, and unhooked his leash. “ ‘I am.’?” I said.
He blinked his eyes in the pink light.
“You can’t stay in Appleseed anymore. You have to go.” I pointed to the town line about a hundred feet away. “That way,” I said.
“I am,” said Sentence, “still sleepy-eyed, he blinked his eyes and—”
“I know, it’s early and this is probably confusing,” I said. “But you just have to listen to what I’m saying to you.”
“Apprehensive,” said Sentence, “I am wished for home.”
“Do you know what they’re doing to language, ‘I am.’? What will happen to you if they find you?”
“Quiet,” said Sentence, “I am can be very hiding and quiet.”
“I’ll see you again—I promise,” I said, choosing my words carefully; any misuse would bring Cones right to us. “But I can’t take care of you anymore. You’re free now. OK? You’re free.”
There were tears in the sentence’s eyes. “Wishing for home,” he said, “I am sorrowly hoped to convey—”
Then I heard a sound in the trees: the snap of a twig. I searched the path behind me, but I didn’t see anyone.
“Appreciative,” said the sentence, “—I am would think back on that time, and their friendships—”
Another twig snapped—this one from somewhere high up. I looked into the trees. I heard a shuffling, and then a leaf fell away from a branch and I saw—
Was it?
Shit: A flare of orange plastic between the leaves.
I turned to “I am.”. “Run. Now. Fast as you can.”
Sentence flashed me a final look and took off, sprinting toward the town line. Its cover blown, the Cone shimmied down the bark and vaulted past me and after “I am.” Sentence looked back, saw the Cone behind him, and sped up, revising as he ran: “I am running run fast.”; “I am sprinting with the wind through my face!” And then, it was like he shifted into high gear or something—I’d never seen language move so fast. His letters italicized and he kicked up leaves behind him. “The sounds are in my hear-and-now: Flams! Sizzion! Toreabloo!”; “I am this word and that word!”
“Run on, ‘I am.’!” I shouted.
Sentence crossed the town line; the Cone stopped at the border and doubled over, his shoulders heaving. But “I am.” didn’t slow down—he kept moving, kept getting louder, truer. “Newchording, Me-oh-mying, transmuliterating!”
I hooted to the sentence. “Keep going, ‘I am.’!”
“Anything and everything! Holy shouts and bouts and rambles! Cries and thanks and bellows, now and forever amen! To on and on and never—”
CHAMPION
That was the end for me, though—without “I am.” I lost myself. I forgot to live and died. I had no friends or family to remind me who I was, or why I was here. You really can’t live that way for very long.
One morning, I was cleaning up dead letters in the worryfields and listening to the remnants of music on my headphones when a bookworm—the sentence “You should just go ahead and die.”—emerged from a bookwormhole. The sentence was wearing a blue concert T-shirt advertising a band I didn’t recognize, and he seemed to be lost. “Excuse me,” said “You should just go ahead and die.”. “Can you tell me how to get back to Fialky’s Fields?”
I couldn’t answer him—I was struck by the words of his face. “I should?” I said.
“I thought I knew the way, but I kind of got turned around,” said “You should just go ahead and die.”.
“And if I did,” said a thought. “Would this all go away? The blight? The darkness?”
“Everything would go away,” the sentence said.
I still had the shovel I’d used to bury my house. I picked it up, put it to the page, and began to dig.
“Good,” said the sentence. “Yup, you got it.”
Soon I’d made a hole in the page about the size of my body. When I was finished, I tossed aside my headphones and lay down. “Could I ask you—if you wouldn’t mind—to bury me?”
“You should just go ahead and die.” looked at his watch. “I’m supposed to get back to my novel by noon.”
“Just a few shovelfuls, maybe.”
The sentence smiled curtly. “Sure,” he said, and he picked up the shovel and started pitching page over me. As he was working, a prayer came in from overhead. “?” It was my Mom. I didn’t answer.
“You should just go ahead and die.” filled the page in around me, leaving only my face exposed. “How’s that?” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Nice and warm.”
“!” prayed my Mom.
“What now?” I shouted to the sentence.
“Now nothing,” he said.
“For how long?” I said.
“Forever, probably,” said “You should go ahead and die.”. Then he picked up a shovelful of page and threw it over my face. I felt the weight of that page—of all of the pages—in my eyes and in my mouth; I choked on it; it filled my throat and my lungs. Then I wasn’t; I let out my breath and died.
When you die, your parents hear it. They know your death in their ears and their hearts and their bones. My Mom was welding a footbridge out past Wolf Swamp when she heard the notes of my death knell. “No,” she said into her welder’s mask. “?” she prayed.
Somewhere off the margin, “I am.” howled.
Six feet above me, the bookworm who’d buried me started coughing. Suddenly all of my sentences started coughing—those in the trees, in the fields, in the fibers. Every word I’d brought into Appleseed, every sentence I’d invented, started spitting up black blood; line by line they squawked, shriveled up, and went silent.
My Dad, working at Muir Drop, saw a sentence fall on the factory floor and stood up from his workbench. He put down his tools and prayed. “? Buddy?”
Just at that moment, down in the page, I had what they call an—
What do they call it?
A realizing. An eponymous? New information in my almost-dead mind.
“Wait a second,” said a thought. “Maybe I don’t need to die. Maybe—”
But it was too late—I was already dead. I had one prayer, maybe less, left in my skull. I prayed it out as far as I could. “Mom! Dad! I’m so sorry. I—” I prayed to anyone who would listen. “All of this was my fault,” I prayed. The prayer—the sentences—wormed out through my skull and toward the surface. But I don’t know if it ever reached anyone. My mind went quiet, and dark, and still.
WESTFIELD SEEK-NO-FURTHER
Diane threw off her welding mask and flew up off the bridge, over the Connecticut River and the western Margin, past the deadgroves and the Prayer Centers and toward home. For the first time, she saw how many stories she’d missed: “Monarch,” “Bastille Square,” “Fathers in the Field,” and so many others. When had all those stories been written? And what were they about?
She landed near the pair of headphones, the corpse of the sentence and the lumpy page. “?” she prayed. She surveyed the site. Then she dropped down to her knees and ran her hands over the freshly turned page. She prayed her son’s name, over and over. On the third prayer, she received an automatic prayer from Appleseed. “I’m sorry, but no party is listed under that prayer name. Please check the name and try praying again.”
Across the street, her husband’s truck pulled into the driveway. Ralph leapt out of the cab and charged across the street. “Di!” he hollered. “Why isn’t answering my prayers?”
Diane’s mind raced. She ran through one idea after the next.
Then Ralph saw the lump. “What’s—” He looked at Diane—her face was a monsoon—and then back at the soil. “No,” he shouted. He dove at the page and started digging with his bare hands. “Wasn’t anyone with him?” he grunted. “That fucking Memory he always hangs out with? Or the Reader—where’s the Reader
?”
Diane looked up into the darkness, then down at the page. “Wait a second,” said one of Diane’s thoughts to another.
“What?” said the second thought.
The first thought said, “What if we—”
“Dig, Di. Dig!” Ralph tossed clumpfuls of page over his shoulder.
Diane lifted off the ground, flew a hundred feet off the page—
“Diane!” shouted Ralph.
—hovered there for a moment, and then shot straight down, gaining speed and dropping through an open bookwormhole and down into the page.
APPLECORE
PICK-YOUR-OWN
Even traveling as fast as she did—scorching through the paper from story to story—it took Diane a long time (hours, days, or years, depending on the novel) to find you. For a while the search seemed never-ending. How many novels were there? More than once, she found a Reader who looked like you—sitting in a noiry diner, rifling through a used bookstore in a bodice-ripper—only to find out when she approached you that it was someone else.
When she finally did track you down, you were living twenty miles away and two years later and working as a newspaper reporter. You weren’t making much meaning at the job, but you were gaining experience and collecting stories. That day, you were covering an event called the Marginalia Arts Festival. You were on deadline—your story was due in less than two hours. One of the organizing tents had agreed to speak with you about the festival’s mission, and you were interviewing them by the entrance. Diane spotted you and the festival tent and dropped down behind a row of Port-a-Potties.
“It’s a great opportunity for artists to make a name for themselves,” the tent told you. “And tents as well.”
You wrote down those quotes. “And where do you see the Marginalia Festival in, say, five years?” you said.
The tent’s brow furrowed. “I’d like people to look forward to Marginalia the same way they do—”
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