The Turquoise Pen

Words, Revisited

Noël R. King

I did not realize how many words were scattered around the house, unkempt and so long forgotten.

As I was sweeping under my bed, for instance, I came across a dilapidated rendering of “supercalifragilisticexpealidocious” in a pile of gray dust under the far corner.

“Oh my goodness!” I said. “Let’s get you out of there and dusted off!”
It jangled and creaked as I hooked it with my broom and dragged it across the floor and out from under the bed.

I took it to the bathtub and gave it a good soaking, after first asking it if it were indeed waterproof. It assured me that it was and that a good bath was what it wished for most, before eating a plate of fish and chips.

“Fish and chips?” I asked. “Really? You eat that kind of stuff?”

Certainly, it told me, and dove back under the bath water.

After that, I saw neglected and wounded words wherever I went in my house. Oh, it was terrible! I could not believe I had never before noticed the carnage. Unused words had been piling up in the corners for years, it soon became apparent, and I had been oblivious the whole time.

Many of them had fallen out of books that I had never finished, I discovered, and there was an entire pile under the kitchen table from where I had ceaselessly interrupted my friends while conversing on the telephone. Many of those words were horribly mangled, chopped in half, torn, stepped on, smushed. Oh, it was awful—I could barely speak when I realized the extent of my betrayal to the English language.

I found words stuffed between and under the couch cushions, many missing vowels and the dots to go over their i’s. I found a bunch of those dots piled in a corner, entangled in spider’s webs and scuffed around the edges. Out on the porch I saw a bird’s nest composed largely of the crossbars that make up f’s and t’s.

“I am SO SORRY!” I cried to all of them while standing in the middle of the living room, a useless “a” dangling from my hand (it had gotten caught in the ceiling fan and was worn and white from all those countless revolutions).

I heard some halfhearted replies, groans, and whimpers from around the house. A few baby words came crawling over to hang onto my feet and play with my bare toes.

I bent down to pick them up. “You are so adorable!” I laughed through my tears. “I cannot bear how cute you are!”

They tittered and giggled, changing shapes and colors as they did.
I set them down and walked over to where I saw a large grouping of dried-out words draped over the top of the large painting of The Last Supper that was hanging on my living room wall.

“What’s going on over here?” I asked them as I drew next to the painting. “Why did you end up here?”

“Picture’s worth a thousand words,” gasped one of the longest words. “Hear it all the time. Kills us! So much less . . . less . . . Why??”
His words ended in a wail, and he began weeping, the tears rolling down over the painting, right over Jesus’ face.

“Oh, honey,” I said. “They never meant that you were worth any less than a painting! The truth is that a picture is worth a thousand words because there are millions and millions of words that make up every painting. That’s what color and paint are made of, didn’t you know?”
The tears slowly stopped as I continued to stand there, and I heard a creaking and crackling as more and more of the other words atop the painting tried to sit up or move.

“Is that true? Is she right? Can it be? Can we trust her?” I heard many rustlings and whisperings back and forth, and I saw that several seemed to be gaining some lifeblood back. Flashes of color started appearing as more and more of them fleshed out and flew or jumped or crawled down the wall off the painting’s edge.

“We can be a painting ourselves!” I heard one particularly bright phrase exclaim as they went by. “We’ve done a bunch of sentences; don’t you think we can do a picture?”

“We can! We can!” was the reverberating response as they climbed up the coffee table and began discussing their newfound vision.
Finally, in the far corner of my bedroom, I saw a very fat pile of unexpressed words, who had apparently tried to escape out the bay window over the years. Many of them, I saw, had gotten stuck between the inside window and outside screen as they had tried uselessly to squeeze themselves through and on to some kind of life—somewhere, anywhere.

“Who are you all?” I asked the group, because it felt like the right thing to do.

You have never heard such a clamoring, such a feverish pitch of expression, such a commotion and loudness of noise, the second I asked.

It was a cacophony, and I saw that word in the middle of the pile, breakdancing amid all the singing, shouting, laughing, and crying of the other words.

“I am SO ANGRY!” I heard. “I’m hungry—LOVE y—want to—wish I cou—FEEL—think that—HA HA HA!—it shoul—HURT—can’t believe yo—why don’t—whatever made you—SORRY—I am—tir—where it—OH! OH!”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get it. You are dying to express yourselves. Go ahead, go ahead, but I am going to leave for a while and shut the door behind me until you’ve gotten all of this out of your systems.”

I literally had to put my hands over my ears before I reached the door, or my hearing might have been damaged permanently. My ears were ringing as it was.

“Good Lord!” I said to myself as I went back to the bathtub and fished out Super. 

“You good to go here?” I asked.

“Oh, you bet” cried Super. “I feel SO SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS!”

“Back to your old self, I see,” I said. “Marvelous!”

“Yes!” Super cried again. “She’s a WONDERFUL friend of mine! Is she here, too?”

“Probably,” I said. “I’ll send her up if I find her.”

“I’m so happy!” Super laughed, as he finished drying himself off and went clinking down the hallway—he had so many joints to maneuver throughout his body.

“Me too,” I said to the air in general, as I sat down on my couch to write in my journal. Then I lightly called to all four corners of my house: “Come join me now, all who wish to help me tell the story of this day and how I rediscovered all of you.”

As I had guessed would happen, I was mobbed right and left with words, phrases, and even completely formed sentences. I thought I might have seen an actual paragraph in there, too, but I was probably just fooling myself.

—As circumstances warrant, through her Turquoise Pen column Noël R. King, Scottsville, Virginia, reports on strange and wonderful or worrisome things, including ignored words dying to express themselves.