Billy’s just announced the next topic.

‘The one that got away.’

I’m on my third can of Stella and I need a piss. But Andrew’s already taken up the challenge and it seems rude to walk away. Besides, as soon as I leave the campfire I’ll be ambushed by the swarm of midges I know is waiting in the dark, surrounding our badly protected little company.

And then there’s the fire itself, which holds me in its seductive trance. It ripples the air, ripping otherworldly openings in the spaces between the dancing licks of flame.

They’re portals, I think. You could travel into one of them, if you didn’t mind getting scorched.

I hold my Stella at arm’s reach. It’s been a while since I’ve been this buzzed.

‘The one that got away,’ repeats Andrew.

As he plays for time, my mind fixates on the phrase itself, on its structure, its underlying grammatical patterns. It’s a noun phrase, though it doesn’t have any nouns in it. ‘The’ is a determiner, ‘one’ is a pronoun, and the rest of it is a relative clause. But how can a pronoun follow a determiner? And could you put any other determiner in front of ‘one’? I try it out, as Leila has taught me to do.

A one that got away.

My one that got away.

That I’ll never be able to ask Leila about this hits me like a punch in the gut.

Read the rest of ‘The Words of Your Language’ at After Happy Hour Review, Issue 13, p. 55-62.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 64 of Structured Visions.