By Claire Bateman

Featured Art by Claire Bateman

Almost everyone was happy when the bioengineers released it into the population, even editors and grammarians whose jobs were rendered obsolete, their pure-hearted love of accuracy transcending their own self-interest. It’s true that a few alarmists were concerned about the way it consumed all other languages as it crackled through the population’s synapses, but against such ferocity and speed, what recourse could there be?

Now words are never misspelled, sentences don’t get knotted and gnarled, and the backspace and delete keys are no longer included on the newest keyboards, just as Microsoft Word Track Changes and Google Edit have been relegated to the Archives of Computer History, and everyone remembers them with the same condescension previous generations felt toward AOL.

Of course, it’s still possible to lie, but only with exquisite clarity, pristine syntax, and formidable structure, not a word or inflection out of place, all nuances of implication in exquisite harmony. The most mundane conversation is like that folktale in which diamonds, pearls, and roses fall from between the heroine’s lips when she speaks.

And as though to live up to this aesthetic upgrade, people have quit throwing soda cans from their car windows and dropping cigarette butts and fast-food wrappers in parking lots. Even the most egregious absentee landlords have shamefacedly arranged for repairs, fresh paint, and landscaping. New buildings are sleeker and brighter, and for the most part, citizens treat each other more honorably, inspired by the nobility of their shared speech.

So why is the underground movement in favor of a contraband coarse and fallible language gaining such momentum? (It’s been rumored that foreign agitators have infiltrated the populace to stir things up, a titillating possibility indeed, but looking around, everyone sees only the same familiar faces.) The truth is that now that the novelty has worn off, people are dissatisfied with the mouthfeel of this angelically refreshing speech, so light, so silky-smooth, delicate as the finest sherbet. An innate chthonic tendency has reasserted itself in favor of a lumpy, gritty language apparently seasoned with flakes of coal, flecks of clay, and fragments of crushed glass; the soul craves the texture of trouble on the tongue.

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Claire Bateman’s pieces are from The Pillow Museum, a fiction collection forthcoming from FC2 in early 2025. Wonders of the Invisible World, a poetry collection, was published by 42 Miles Press/Wolfson Press in September.