Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts, shrivelling out of existence, threatening to take pieces of you with them. I look from…
The story began as a response to a prompt about language. I took it literally and chose to look at language’s loss, how its usual definition and experience would have to evolve and deepen into something “new” due to the loss of the “old.” I am also a poet, and I saw this prompt as an opportunity to write something a little experimental by borrowing a poetic form.
I believe in the uniformity of form and concept, something I learned from a wonderful writer on YouTube, Shaelin Bishop. Thus, I knew the form had to be inextricable from the story, not just function as a pretty gimmick. It had to actually enhance the story’s themes and the relationship between the two main characters. I succeeded in that goal, as there is something quite poignant about exploring the degeneration of language using its basic building blocks.
When I decided to write the story as an abecedarian, I thought of the diagnosis which begins with the letter A, and I weighed whether to have it be at the beginning or the end. The story decided for me, as it is a story of grief – a woman grieving the loss of her words which are fundamental to most communication. The narrative arc unintentionally mirrors the stages of grief, ending with acceptance. Thus, it felt right to have the diagnosis close out the story when the grandmother has completely come to terms with it.
I also wanted to explore the idea of language without words. I believe that if we think of our favourite memories with our loved ones, we may find a few in which no words are spoken. Perhaps an instance which involves only a look, a shared feeling, and the air between us buzzes, enveloping us in that sliver of frozen time and we know each other deeply and perfectly. Those rare moments were what I hoped to capture in this story.
The story is, at its core, about a love that speaks in silence and reaches across language barriers. This central idea influenced how I approached the point of view. It came to me intuitively, because I wanted a point of view wherein both main characters were included in some way. In most traditional first-, third- and second-person points of view, the focus is singular (if we just sweep third-person omniscient under the rug for a moment). By choosing to write it in a hybrid first-second person, which I call ‘first-person address,’ the grandmother is brought closer to the reader (as writers, we need to standardize a name for this technique). Consequently, the piece reads quite intimately, not as a story meant for consumption by others, but as a love letter written by someone who knows the other person so deeply, they can almost peek into their mind and guess accurately at their thoughts.
H. B. ASARI is a Niger Deltan prose and poetry writer. Her work explores current and possible future climate realities, complicated familial bonds, and the nuances of queer coming-of-age experiences. Her work was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2023 and the Climate Change Poetry Prize in 2022, nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023, and won the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize in 2024. She has been published in adda, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Consequence Forum, and more. She is working on a novel that seamlessly integrates all her interests. Find her on Instagram @draft_oroguitas.
