Epilogue

Comma and Apostrophe (Part I)

     Once upon a time, there was a girl who did a stupid thing for love. As punishment for her crime, she was locked away for five hundred years in a perpetual state of semi-consciousness. But she did not dream; those who had imprisoned her had stripped her of everything she had, including her dreams. She remained in her semi-conscious state, devoid of any concrete sense of self. She experienced only those states of being deemed objectionable by those with the capacity to perceive them: shame, worthlessness, fear, hate, agony, and—on occasion—severe nausea.

     So long had she been kept on the brink of non-existence, that when she was finally freed from her prison, she rejected reality, burrowing further into the cozy den of oblivion inside what was left of her shattered mind. But reality persisted, smothering her, penetrating her every pore, tearing down each and every wall she constructed around her delicate ego. And when at last she could stave it off no longer, it occurred to her that her sentence had only just begun; existence was to be her punishment.

***

     The first real thing she latched on to was violet. She knew it by name because it wasn't supposed to exist in her world; that much she could remember. She'd been called maqpi, which meant cursed child, because of the colour of her eyes. It was only fitting then that her saviour should have violet hair. Maybe she was a maqpi too.

     "Where... am I?" The girl's voice cracked as she spoke. She asked not because she needed to know (she recognized the yellowed slab that comprised the holding chamber, though she knew not the specifics of how she'd come to be there), but because she had forgotten the sound of her own voice. She flinched upon hearing her voice flutter in her throat and clumsily tumble across her tongue only to fall apart at her lips.

     "I was hoping you could tell me." This maqpi... it was female, but it was not alpen. The girl knew this because the maqpi had rounded ears and no aura. The maqpi, who wore a strange sort of coat fashioned out of a roughly-hewn faded blue material, sat on the stone floor, fiddling with a plastic wrapping. She removed a porous, yellow substance and tore off a piece, handing it to the girl. "You hungry?"

     The girl accepted the offering, subjecting it to much scrutiny before tentatively nibbling on the corner. It was soft, like a sponge, and had a dulceous taste. When she said as much, the maqpi gave her a funny look.

     "Dulchi-what? I think the word you're looking for is sweet."

     "Sweet?" The girl tasted the word. Ironically, she did not find it very dulceous.

     "Guess that's not a word where you come from, huh?" The maqpi bit her lip. "Um, I guess this place is where you come from. Which is where, exactly?"

     The girl thought hard, mining the caverns of knowledge that remained accessible to her, despite her stupor. "Home."

     The maqpi's shoulders shook with laughter. The girl was uncertain what she'd done to elicit such vulgarity. But the maqpi seemed to think nothing of it; she wiped a bit of moisture that had collected in the corners of her eyes.

     "Guess I walked right into that one. Okay, let's come at this from a different angle. You got a name?"

     The girl placed a finger to her lip but quickly removed it. Only children touched their fingers to their lips while they thought, and she was no longer a child. In response to the maqpi's question, the girl could only shake her head. "The elders revoked my name."