If I may, dear reader, bestow upon you a secret unworthy of being kept, I would grant you permission to forget it from yourself upon the completion of the story which rests upon it. There are, as we know by now, things by the dozen which are known by no one besides the one who does, and which though technically so would never be once called a secret. A secret's existence is borne by the act of concealment, the intent of invisibility, or perhaps even, attempted denial in total of the thing in question. Of course we also know by now that there are indeed what we may call sleeping facts, those which had been by force of lock and key and bolt and guard dog kept removed so long that their efforts to free themselves have long since atrophied, their bodies long since fallen to dreamless sleep, and now so weak that the threat of their exposure has evaporated off the tongue of a yawning secret's mouth where fire-breath once blazed. Indeed we find ourselves with such a boring secret, pitiful really as an old honored warrior whose hands now shake beyond ability to hold a cup even half full without wetting the floor. The secret to be told has as it's keeper our dear friend the adventuress who writes now more fervently than if the pen was her sacrament. I've now bundles of letters with her name scratched as sender, arriving in handfuls day after day. To be honest with you my dear reader, I haven't had time nor really the interest to unstring the ribbon which holds them together, to tear through their envelopes and thumb through them all, but what I did weather through struck me half curious, and I blinked as she rendered this secret unkept. She referenced it without preface, and lingered not upon it, simply nodded it's existence and kept on with her tale. So here shall I follow the telling she told me of the afternoon spent spelling with a 3- and 7-year old.
If you, my dear reader, were to ask little Zoe the number of years which she has, she would flash up two fingers, which would become four, until her thumb found her pinky and shuffled no more. Her sister Eva, with 7, would nod to encourage her but still roll her eyes to show she knows better. Then Zoe would drag by a hand or a foot, her doll with the eyes which eerily close when laid on her back or turned on her nose, and Zoe would tell you that her doll is crying, and look to you for advice which you should be supplying. You might ask her why the poor doll is sad, to which she'd respond that it's afraid of dying. Now here, as we know, there are many responses, but shall we assume, for the sake of trying, that you, lovely reader, would say to her this: "But everyone dies, there's no use in crying." perhaps, in due time, you'd realize you were lying. For truly we know the end which we take, all of us, really, the dukes and the snakes, the darkness and vastness of which we know peep, though its sometimes a comfort to remember the fate, more often than not it's a cause for debate and more often than that, the reason we weep.
Well this is the story laid out in ink from a pen in need of replacing on a wrinkle-torn page stuffed into its casing and sent overseas. I'll pause for a moment, to just take a sip of the water which tempts me with each word that I scribble. And here, with lips whetted, I'll renegue on my promise, for having given it thought, this secret is truly due much more homage. Our lovely heroine was once not so much, a shadow, a cold thing, wet in the dust. Her mouth smiled strangely, unnatural, ashamed, and was often pried open to purge bile and pain. Her thoughts were once nasty, more nasty than now, and sometimes turned to face that fate: dying and how. There are jokes on attempters and those who then fail, but assuredly, dear readers, it avails you to think of the numerous times even weak efforts are made to tempt that strange fate by those who we know, once loved and with often played. And so without doing disgrace or dishonor, and with the utmost taste, we continue on knowing that our friend had once nearly been dressed in her best lace.
Zoe, it should be said, took this response in stride, promptly dropped her doll to the side and went off for a nap. Our heroine friend was sitting contented, when Eva descended and requested a game: "Le Pendu!" she implored, and grasped onto the wrist, pulling our friend to the floor. A moment, perhaps, is required to translate, for along with the menus, animals, and venues, games also have French names which differ from ours. Pendu is the past tense, sometimes a noun, or even descriptor, of the verb meaning hang, in this case "The Hanged." We have such a game in the US as well, though in that case we call it, "Hangman;" pray tell, have you ever played crosswords, scrabble, or boggle, in a language besides that in which your mind often squabbles? All of a sudden/soudain, things become more than you thought, and letters themselves have names which have changed and a frequency different than you're used/Je ne suis pas habitué à cela.
Eva gave clue that her word contained 4 of it's parts, and so drew on scrap paper like so: _ _ _ _. Our friend struggled in guessing. Rather, she pointedly lacked effort in direction, for to know how to guess by probability of letter and frequency of use, one demands an intimacy with the language, so it be ready-to-hand. Language, indeed is so material a thing, a tool to be wielded and an amnion to which we yield all at once. The adventuress is less philosophy and more curiosity, and so she continued to guess. Her mouth was the shape of mispronunciation, turning "E" into "U" and "I" into "E" and emitting what turned out only to be heard as grunts intended to indicate "U," she was finally left with C H A _, with one guess left before a sentence to death by hanging. "ENne?" she ventured, but nay, and her heart stopped by rope and dismay. CHAT was the word: cat, but of course. So simple a word, and yet so far from grasp.
Hélas! Alors, this is what makes the world. And she is now begging for life to go on.
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