The Wordless Threshold
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
She discovered the first missing word on a Tuesday morning while standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the garden. The word for the space she occupied was gone. Not forgotten, exactly - she could still feel its shape in her mouth, could almost taste its edges - but when she reached for it, her mind grasped only air. The doorway remained, solid as ever. The word had simply stepped out for a moment, leaving behind a silence more profound than any absence she had ever known. Perhaps by the end of afternoon the thing would return, or the rhythm of the afternoon itself would activate the word like some kind of switch and prick the divide. But by evening the silence only had a louder edge and, in the middle of the night, she woke in her cotton pyjamas on a cold wood floor, shaken from a well of shadow where only her very awakening brought the promise of day’s warmth. For the next week the words fell short, failed to address the divide, be it as string, adhesive, or spell.
The word drowned in the fog, clung to the back of eucalyptus, inhaled and exhaled in the very smallest fossils and fossils’ fossils. Eventually, the only realization the woman could reach of any kind was one of scale, not word, or image or sound: drowned, exhaled, inhaling, stuck to the mushrooms and the tree trunks, woven into the roots, yes, to the poem arranged round the back fence, where she thought she had hung no words at all, or words (because of their failures) written in magic-marker of very small size, invisible except in sunlight, by a child’s exacting hand, arranging the indentions. (How small! To be indented! How almost
shakable by wind!) And her garden was a poem, but not her reading of the poem, in which she read not its shape but its presence. It was all about the reader, and no reader of hers would ever exist under its spell, certainly not the doctor. And all of this, of course, seemed far too clinical to entirely describe her linguistic condition. Though she had discovered the missing word’s absence through a physical gesture◆ About the ending
❧ About the title