Tag Archives: subject verb agreement

The lexicographer

Greyscale photo of a stack of old books and papers in a room
Photo by Felipe Furtado

The bookshelf falls with a conclusive thud. Volumes of dictionaries flap to the floor, their spines irreparably dislocated, their yellow pages exposed to greedy, scurrying mice. Billy the lexicographer realises with a tremor of despair that he is trapped. A lifetime acquiring language will end with him suffocating under the weight of words. 

He’ll spend his final moments naming things: the marble table, the antique wardrobe, the upholstered dining room chairs. Bodies of plastic baby dolls, a bag of mouldy limbs and hairless, eyeless heads. Mountains of newspaper, rodent insulation. Grandmother’s tarnished silverware. A treasure box of costume jewellery. 

An unfamiliar longing: to be free of noun phrases. To unacquire language. Billy’s gaze scurries frantically around the room, replacing objects with object pronouns. This. That. Those. Them. Him. Me. 

They. He. I. The objects become subjects. The subjects invite agreeable verbs. The verbs are finite: This too shall pass. 

I, too, shall pass, decides Billy. He raises himself up upon mouldy legs, passes a trembling hand over a hairless head and clears a path through his storeroom of hoarded language. 

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The essence of the Amazon

shallow focus photo of rain drop on glass
Photo by Horvath Mark

The many hued harmonies of the Amazon crystallised in a drop of dew, which dissolved and reformed countless times in its unlikely journey across the Atlantic. It made it as far as the upstairs window pane of a terraced house in Bristol without losing its amazonian essence. It celebrated the miracle by casting the colours of choirs of high-canopied birds against an interior wall. 

The room’s sole inhabitant was a red-lored parrot named Honey. When she witnessed the rainforest projected in all its prismatic splendour she felt a longing she had never known in all her indoor life.

‘I love you,’ she told the tiny globe of dew, which clung to the window, still intact. ‘Stay here with me.’

The essence of the Amazon felt the constraints of human language pressing against its vast expanse more tightly than the bars of any cage. Subjects, verbs and objects in uncomplaining agreement. 

No easy escape offered itself, except to conjure up an amazonian heat unknown in this climate and surrender to the oblivion of the city’s dank atmosphere.

The faraway forest, sensing the demise of its fractal extension, shuddered with foreboding.