Boston Review - October 2018

Herrera

been a streetlight, the following morning he found just a box of cats.

Eventually he understood that this urban transience (if indeed we can

employ this adjective or that noun) itself informed him of precisely

what he was looking for.

It’s not that the local language is unstable but that there are multiple

languages, with each individual speaking only their own. Alone, at home,

cooking, out for a walk, but never in dialogue. The differences between

what each inhabitant speaks extend far beyond the lexical. For instance,

there exist multiple ways to say “I am alive”: to be stressed, alert, flowing,

trembling; in addition, there are clear syntactical differences, like so:

Stressedme.

I-alert, i-alert.

Meflow afterflow

Sirtremblingso.

Though not every language studied exhibits agreement in gender and

number (the planet’s inhabitants, it would seem, are not particularly inter-

ested in numbering objects; and though there are languages recognizing

two genders, others identify up to fourteen), one common characteristic

is agreement in spirit. A complete sentence may introduce prefixes, infixes,

or suffixes to denote the spirit in which the action is performed.

Thus, the aforementioned examples might be:

Distressedme.

Inpeace-alert, i-alert.

Melliflow afterflow.

Sirtremblingsobad.

And so forth.