I have a confession, kept secret for years. Now that I am no longer who I was, I can share my story without fear of being seen as a monster. It may sound more like a misdemeanour than a crime, but it was, to me, a crime, an admittedly strange crime, flowing from a strange, hopefully forgivable, need. You will understand why I never talked about it before, but why I finally can. Hear me out.
There are certain words when I see them I simply must make mine. I am a word thief.
Months ago, I didn’t even know I had this need. I was a being of few words and kept to myself. One night, I was stumbling through the old town just after dusk with a pounding headache, as was unfortunately so often the case, when I heard it – the word “cinnamon”. Its three syllables danced in my mind, and my headache vanished. It was bliss. I had never really heard that word in public before, not that I recall. It was a private word for me, from my late master.
I should explain: my master was a wise and learned man. He would read poetry in the evening to me, a cinnamon roll and mint tea next to him.
What I heard just then was not my master’s frail voice that was, to me, a melody transported by a wisp of wind. This was a strong, clear but warm voice, like a bell made of gold. A woman uttered to her daughter, ‘Cinnamon bun?’ The girl nodded and smiled.
I followed them from a distance, hoping to again hear the word, to remember my master and keep the headache at bay. I didn’t want to scare them. I am not a creep. I loathe creeps. I am made of finer clay.
In the bakery window, I saw rows and rows of round whirls, browned, speckled darker in places. When the bakery door closed, I smelt something interesting, sweet and wonderfully familiar. I didn’t have any money. But that didn’t matter. I could wait. I am patient.
At midnight, the kindly baker left unsold fare on a small metal table. A few dark forms shuffled in the shadows. A woollen gloved hand reached for one and quickly withdrew. A second, this one ungloved, grimy, took the next. Neither said a word, which was disappointing.
There were only three left, and my mind was aching. The headache was returning with an ever more painful thump, thump, thump. I stepped out of the shadow and quickly slipped back in as another hand grabbed a cinnamon bun, two. A man said, ‘I have a cinnamon bun for you.’ His voice was weary but pierced by a note of joy.
I was hopeful at first, then disappointed and angry at myself for having hoped. The voice wasn’t talking to me, wasn’t offering to give me a cinnamon bun, but to his friend hidden in the alley opposite. I waited, and only then did I realise that the thump, thump, thump was gone. They had said the word. I took the last bun and walked into the shadows in the narrow streets, repeating the word “cinnamon” and remembering my master.
He was crying when I first opened my eyes and saw him, silver-tipped brush in his hand, in front of me, my forehead strangely wet and tickling. I raised my hand, and his pale, liver-spotted hand stopped mine. ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Listen instead. Let these words feed you.’
I didn’t understand then what he meant. Initially, I hardly understood a word, but his voice was kind, fragile, yet somehow unbendingly strong, so I did as he bade me and listened.
Master sat in his quilt-covered chair and read from one of his thousand books, words that danced, that rhymed and sang. I felt them land and make a home in my mind, on my skin. I felt them become mine, become me, me become them. I felt lighter and better with each stanza.
We had spent months together before the fateful night when his heart simply stopped after his words beat out the last line of his favourite poem. I didn’t notice at first, as like every evening, he had taken out a book and read, and like every evening, my mind breathed as I felt the words whisper their meaning to me, and like every other evening after he pronounced the last syllable he sat and I stood, both reflecting on the words. I chose my favourites among them. They were like special friends to me, for I had no friends beyond my master and his words. When I shared my selection with him that night he didn’t nod and smile as usual. His eyes were closed. Forever. I was numb, unable to move. I have no idea how long I stood there before my headaches started, and I ran from the house into the shadows, scared, deeply sad, and angry at being alone. Worse, when I finally came back his house was full of his cousins, taking away his body. I was my master’s secret, so I didn’t dare speak to them, and it was impossible to sneak in undetected. So I walked in the shadows, hoping to hear words that would calm my mind, like my master’s would. And “cinnamon” was the first word outside that worked.
In the days ahead, repeating the word cinnamon to myself kept me calm. My master had told me that I needed to stay calm. I can get angry, you see. I learnt this. When the headache got too loud, I accidentally hurt people near me. I am strong and clumsy. For days, after the cinnamon buns, there were no accidents. But a week later, the word no longer worked. I followed crowds at a safe distance, listening to them, trying to hear what they said, what words they used and how they used them, hoping to hear other words as magic as the cinnamon that had momentarily cured me. I learnt many words just by listening, but my frustration grew. While most words left me cold, a few calmed me, and then most only for minutes – breath, ethereal and diaphanous were three that worked. If felt my step lighter after hearing these. Other words worked for only for a handful of seconds: breeze, resonance, seer. None, so far, like cinnamon, for an hour. A wonderful hour of peace. But that too waned, down to minutes, now only seconds.
Moreover, the walking people often said the same things, using the same worn words. The weather didn’t interest me. Most people’s work seemed too foreign to attract me. I thought then I would never have a job like them – paid, respected. Listening barely helped. Worse, there were some words that irritated me. To name three: ugly and stupid, oh, and monster. Without knowing, when I heard these in any sentence, my pace would quicken, my fists would ball, my thoughts cloud. I was scared the headache would return with a vengeance and that I’d accidentally hurt people. My master taught me loyalty and the beauty of true words (and that I should beware of my strength); he didn’t teach me how to defend myself against words that try to worm their way into me, leaching their poison. But learn I could and learn I would.
Tired but resolute, I leant against a wall and watched a young man and woman reading in a café. The woman laughed when the man gave her a book. ‘You remembered my favourite collection,’ she said. I liked the sound of her voice, her laugh, like a spring wind on my skin. She leant towards the man, kissed him, and added, ‘The book that brought us together.’ She pointed at a page with her slender finger and said, ‘Do you remember that I love this word, “scintillating”?’ My mind went quiet, and I was so relieved I barely heard him replying, “I do,” but hear it, I did. It was like the click of a lock being unlocked with “scintillating” the key! Ah, the word’s four syllables oscillated in my head; they roamed. I felt my mind curious, welcoming the word, studying it. Finally, the word made a home in me. It echoed. It felt like the true sound of a crack-free bell. The sound “scintillating” was wonderful.
Alas, in the days ahead, I never heard anyone use it. Life became dull; the ache returned. My mood darkened.
Despite what my late master had initially said, I was not stupid. The word “scintillating” came from a book. I didn’t have to hang around people, always worried I’d scare them. I did, I admit, follow the couple, and when they were lost in each other’s stare, I stole their book from their coffee table. As I wasn’t a common thief (my master, when I finally dared to comment on the poems he read, said I was made from the finest clay) and, as I knew it meant so much to them, I promised myself I’d give it back when I had finished with it. But that took months. There were so many words. I read slowly at first, then faster. They sang in my mind. But it wasn’t the time passed that stopped me from giving the book back. It was something else.
Now, my confession. When I touched the word “scintillating,” it blackened the word, erasing it. I felt the word reside in my finger, its echo inside me. I smiled, then almost shouted. The word was was gone from the page, hidden. I had stolen the word. Others now could only see a blackened horizontal line where the word had lain, waiting to be read. Each word I loved, each word that calmed my mind as I spoke it, as I touched it, was blacked out, hidden, erased for others, but echoed in me, resided there, a new home. Despite a sharp pang of guilt, for a while, I felt good, really good, a little bit more whole, more me, or simply more. My headaches were gone, my mind clearer, and even my skin felt better. When I looked in the water, the silver word that my master had written on my forehead with his brush was gone.
When the headache returned, I again sought the special words. In their book, maybe one in every stanza worked. I got hooked. By the end, several words were erased on every page. I couldn’t give them the book back like this. Fortunately, the words lived inside me, echoing, whispering. Whenever I looked at the blackened text, the words I stole sang in my mind. But even that was not enough; while I could hear the words, their effect waned with time. My hunger returned and grew.
One night, I snuck into my master’s old house. Everything was empty, bar white sheets and pots of paints. All his books were gone. I took to loitering around the book markets. There were always some books thrown away. These often had no words that I wanted to touch with my fingertips, to steal words from the page and leave but black, the words erased under the thick black line, redacted. Desperate, I tried other words, words I didn’t love, wasn’t curious about. The skin on my hand itched, complained. I didn’t like that. I felt polluted. No, I would only touch the ones that were special to me, that fed me.
Wary, I looked more carefully for the right books. Every once in a while, I was lucky and found books with many words that pleased me. I keep those. I now have eleven. I no longer loiter in the dark. My skin is better. People no longer look at me with fear. It was time to settle my debt.
Earlier this week, I took a fresh book and scanned the page, running my finger along the text, ignoring the itch as I blacked out each word – a horizontal dark bar eclipsed each word until I came to the first word of the couple’s poetry collection. I lifted my finger and left it untouched, visible. Chosen. I pressed my finger back down on the other side of the word and continued, again erasing the words, replaced by the black trace, until I found the poem’s second word. I again skipped that to leave it free. I erased most of the words in the book with my dark eclipsing highlights, keeping only the words from the poems I stole. These I left visible, framed by the thick black lines. It took some doing to get all the poem’s words in one book, in the right order, and my hand itched like mad. In fact, I only got it to fully work on the third book, feeling terrible. I wanted to shed my skin. But, as I said, I am patient. And I’m used to suffering. I left the book for them on the edge of the table next to them, where I had sat, the crumbs of my weekly cinnamon bun on the plate nearby.
They called after me. I said, my hat drawn down to hide my face, ‘It is yours. See the words that have not been blacked out. Do they remind you of anything? It is a scintillating read.’ It was good to speak – my first time. My voice was pleasantly deep, the vowels rounded, the consonants clear but without the edges some people have. My voice, in some ways, was like the first word I absorbed: cinnamon.
The woman opened the book as I slipped into the shadows. She smiled and pointed to the word ‘scintillating,’ kept reading, then, mouth open, realised that I had given back her beloved poems, just differently presented: made by my fingers erasing all the unnecessary words and keeping the words she loved, revealing the beautiful poems hidden among the words. She stared after me, searching for me in the shadows. Her young man leapt up to seek me out. But I know the shadows better than others, even now, that I am no longer a golem but a poet.
Originally published in The Brussels Review.
