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Anne Earney __________________________________________________________
Before Emma had letters she drew crayon scratches of bright colors and bold shapes to represent her world. A blue blob was a cow; the brown lines she colored under its feet showed it was running. Yellow was the sun, white the clouds, and simple, the world. A red heart on each page stood for "Emma," author and person. Emma first discovered the letters, white and bloated, spelling nonsense in her soup. She ate them with a spoon. As she grew up she used crayons to copy the letters-of-the-day she saw on Sesame Street, and soon she made friends with The Letter People--colorful characters, larger-than-life: Mr. T with Tall Teeth; Mr. F with Funny Feet. An entire alphabet of letters befriended Emma, and as she got to know them, she learned they meant more than any old crayon mark. Only her family knew the stick figure Emma drew with brown hair was her mom, but the word, M-O-M, everyone understood. The letters matured as Emma did. Figures once made with colorful wax were later drawn with gray graphite and, then, with blue ink, until finally, rows of uniform, black symbols marched out of the printer, the heels of their boots clicking on the smooth white paper. Soon Emma stopped thinking of the letters as they had been--fun and colorful--and she noticed only when one was missing, or misplaced. Her adult self might have noted that cows were black and white, not blue. But the letters still noticed Emma and, saddened by her inattention, they began to die. She scarcely noticed at first--a consonant missing here or there, from a word or the keyboard. A letter whose shape Emma could not quite recall might trouble her for a bit, but she soon forgot. Over time, entire words fell apart, their meanings lost, the vowels evaporated into thin air, consonants cracked and fallen to the floor like pieces of old pottery. Emma’s world retreated into a past devoid of letters, where crayon scratches covered the walls, meaningless to adult minds indoctrinated on theories of print, meaningless to Emma. When the letters were gone, Emma could no longer quite recall what it was she had needed them for. She died, an old woman without a will, without a word. Her headstone was left blank and most days there is nothing to see, but sometimes, after rain, there is said to be the faintest shadow of a picture and, at other times, a hint of a word, though its meaning was lost long ago.__________________________________________________________
Anne Earney received her MFA in fiction from the University of Missouri in
St. Louis, where she lives. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming
in Big Ugly Review, Flyway, Interstice and an anthology of Missouri writers
from Cave Hollow Press. She served as guest editor for the fall 2005 issue
of flashquake. "Dream of the Alphabet" first appeared in an art show, The
Alphabet as Art, at U-Mass Lowell in Boston.
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