Assistant Editor Holli Carrell: In this vivid, evocative, and mysterious flash prose story, Asma Al-Masyabi explores the effects of a consciousness-shifting global event on various communities and individuals. I am moved by how Al-Masyabi carefully explores the links between trauma and the loss of language, connection, community, and self.
Loss for Words
In the months afterward, many chased after it. They knocked on their neighbors’ doors with orange cranberry scones or beef stew, shifting their weight from foot to foot as they waited, anxious for the slightest eye contact. They filled their carts with nonessentials, puddings and Twinkies, their toilet paper and canned beans already stacked high back home. They waited in lines that stretched into the emptying aisles as stores frantically replaced their technology with people again. Not everyone followed this expected trajectory. Some found themselves splayed out beneath stretched branches in local parks, or on their own overgrown lawns, ears tickled by tips of grass, euphoric at the new taste of green and sky and nothing else. Others holed themselves inside and screamed soundlessly into the darkness until their throats were raw and the taste of blood never left. Soon, word burning became a regular occurrence, an instinct. Dead things need only burn to disappear. It started with a woman in Bangkok, a boy in Mbabane, a man in Quebec, a girl in Ulaanbaatar. Around the world appeared a single word, painted thick with dark paint onto a piece of wood or paper, set alight in the epicenter of a subdued crowd. At least once a week, whether in city streets, the emptiness of the suburban asphalt, or the dusty roads of towns slowly dying, people gathered to grieve the words they lost and the ones losing themselves. They watched the smoke rise, the paper disintegrate, the wood fizzle into lifelessness. They watched, lungs full with the smell of death, in silence; as everything was done.
Asma Al-Masyabi is a poet, writer, visual artist, and student based in Colorado. She is a Scholastic Silver Medal Poetry winner with publications in Subnivean, the Santa Clara Review, the Riverstone Literary Journal, and more. She’s currently pursuing a degree in creative writing at the University of Colorado Denver.
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