Romance
by Avital Gad-Cykman
I dream of a secret romance with a language. Clandestine outings, loops of words wrapped around my body when we spend long nights in a loft looking over a city and send words like a whip across the sky. I bend over the banister and bare my soul. The words taste cool and moist like dew as they slide off my tongue.
After the sexy times, we get serious. My language births words for the brain so it can wrap itself around contemporary monsters. My fear hides in the gaps and holes between words, where unnamed wars are about to break out. Named, even monsters lose their shadowy presence and let us caress their sinewy backs.
As we open up, my language gifts me with broken words and limping sentences that got lost over the generations, and seek a new mouth to pronounce them. These words are loaded, heavy with history. Ours. They melt on my tongue, then I solidify them into bearable shapes. It is possible to make toys out of ruins.
I take my language for a date at a restaurant. We are three: I, my language and a man. The language comes between us, as if I need a protector, but the man’s lips project rhymes: dandy, candy, candy cane. I get him, his words. Ours. We are alone with the language, even lonely, but we’re safe with language between us. No one can reach our core.
Avital Gad-Cykman is the author of Light Reflection Over Blues (Ravenna Press) and Life In, Life Out (Matter Press). She is the winner of Margaret Atwood Studies Magazine Prize and The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest, twice a finalist for the Iowa Fiction Award and a six-time nominee for the Pushcart. Her stories appear in The Dr. Eckleburg Review, Iron Horse, Prairie Schooner, Ambit, McSweeney’s Quarterly and Michigan Quarterly, twice in Best Short Fictions, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International anthology and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English Literature, focused on minorities, gender and trauma, and lives in Brazil.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Romance”? Languages are untamed beasts. I love their words, for their beauty and many meanings. They help me communicate and absorb, but their limitation is clear. The proof of the limit is that each language gives a slightly different shape to what rises from the same person. Perhaps we’d better know all words and languages, to improve the precision and subtlety, or maybe, this will not be enough either. If I sound like a frustrated lover, then I managed to convey the origin of this flash.
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