The Flame Alphabet

Murphy held forth on the flame alphabet as though he’d been in the hut with us. The name as deceiving shade. Nothing called by its accurate title. We’ve trafficked in an inexact language that must be translated anew. Not even translated. Destroyed. Rebuilt. The call for a new code, new lettering, a way to pass on messages that would bypass the toxic alphabet, the chemically foul speech we now used.

“The solution is in scripts, don’t you think?” he asked. It wasn’t a question for me. “Visual codes. Except not the ones we know. The ones we know are already causing problems. Reading is next. It’s not even next. It’s now.”
We had to prepare for a time, said Murphy, when communication was impossible. This thing started with children, but you were a fool to think it would stop there. Some of us were fools anyway.

The evidence was mounting, but I seemed to have a pact against insight, a refusal to name my poison. Esther had no such inhibition. Esther knew, in the precocious way of nearly everyone but us. She might have thought it was what she said that hurt us: the actual words in their scathing specifics, as if meaning itself ever had that kind of power. But she could have been singing us love songs, cooing little melodies of affection, and the effect would have been the same. By now, or maybe always, the meaning failed to matter.

We had missed the warnings on this one, phrases transmitted to our synagogue, the rabbi’s droning cautions. And they were killed with their own names. From the Psalms. Beware your name, for it is the first venom. Revelations. These warnings had always seemed like metaphors, the wishful equations of some ancient person’s mind. Little comfort, in the end, and it wasn’t my name alone that was toxic, but all of them.