The disappearances began harmlessly enough. The first report of theft came from the dentist’s office on Broadway Street, the one with the giant tooth whose enamel has to be repainted every spring. The transcription of the audio went something like this:
Click.
Communications specialist: “You’ve reached the Sheriff’s Office. How may I direct your call?”
Caller: “The magazines are all missing their texts. Words, all gone, nothing but commas and periods left. You have to send someone right away. There weren’t many words to begin with, and the pictures are all that’s left and that’s all right, except no one wants to be seen reading the wrong magazine, should anyone be able to tell which was which when only the advertisements and a few pictures that accompanied the articles remain. Imagine an old man caught reading Seventeen. He’d be labelled a pervert, and his wife would leave him. Who would give the poor old man his meds, remind him to brush his teeth? Pictures. You can’t even tell what they’re advertising without the words!”
Communications specialist: “A picture is worth a thousand words, isn’t it?”
That wasn’t funny. Not one bit. Good money had been paid in subscribing to those magazines. Then the caller, who was never identified, began laughing, repeating over and over that there was a really good joke in that one magazine, and hung up the phone.
The next place to suffer was the peewee football game. All the names and numbers on the jerseys disappeared mid-game, and some of the parents mistakenly took home the wrong children. Frightened over those missing numbers, the parents didn’t even bother to take off the children’s helmets before buckling them up inside their minivans and SUVs. What mattered was that there was a kid in the seat to go home with, someone to feed and put to bed. Thankfully, the opposing team had different-coloured jerseys.
This happening made the local news, though everyone — no matter how many of the parents and the children protested — thought it was a prank.
“I tried to tell her I was Tommy!” became the saying of the week.
Two weeks went by before another textual indiscretion occurred. It happened right underneath the entire police force’s noses. It was horrible timing. The police were in the midst of negotiating the surrender of a bank robber — who really didn’t mean to rob the bank but had no choice when they doubled his fees by authorizing an electronic withdrawal from his account of funds they knew damn well he didn’t have — when the dialogue of the negotiation script, as written by the FBI, disappeared.
Something similar happened to the robber’s list of demands.
Both police and robber stared at one another a good long time through the drive-thru window. They communicated through the pneumatic tubes on deposit slips because the robber wanted to get his point across. He wanted everything in writing. It was an even longer good long time before both sides decided the best thing to do was boost the town’s national visibility by having an old-fashioned shootout. No one was hurt, but a lot of shit that cost a shitload of money was shot to hell.
The shootout made the headlines, but no one knew what had really happened because the reporter’s teleprompter went blank. The robber was shown being taken into police custody; the footage was paused to show his teeth. The reporter fired her intern shortly after, and she never, ever again wore that brown knock-off dress that matched her eyes.
Soon, the incidents escalated. Shops lost their sale prices. The payroll company issued blank bank drafts, causing a mini Main Street depression. Street signs became nameless green strips of metal at which pedestrians and motorists stopped, unable to decide which way to go. The blank history marker outside that building with the weathered wood-plank siding was particularly distressing. People really felt they were losing their identity at this point. No one could remember why the building was so important. All the elderly gave conflicting accounts because they couldn’t figure out which way was which in the nursing home since the thief had taken off the names of the wing signs.
Then, the town’s population sign on the outskirts was hit. First, a 3 vanished, and the mother of two who lived down the street was gone, along with her kids. Next, the 9 of the hundreds spot and the 5 of the thousands. Week after week, groups of people went missing until only those who had moved to town or had been born since that sign was created were left.
The survivors held a town meeting to put this business of the words thief to an end. No one was much help. The babbling babies, who were all named Babbling Baby because no one was left who knew their names, disappeared as soon as the door to the makeshift daycare was shut.
“It has to be one of us,” these that were left said over and over to each other.
They searched one another’s pockets, but the only thing that was found was a small notebook on the guy who laughed when he was anxious. He was the one who named all the babbling babies Babbling Baby, they said in an uproarious tone. He pleaded that he was writing down all the words that had gone missing, that was all.
An hour of grunting and staring at one another went by before they made a fatal mistake. Tired of saying “you” and “who” in equal verbal exchanges, the crafty organizer amongst them made name badges.
They vanished in non-alphabetical order. Steven was on the phone with his mistress in a city he refused to name when his end of the line went dead. Cindy never came back from the restroom. Mark left behind a half-eaten ham pinwheel and the bits of pickle from his potato salad. Tracy had just completed a game of hangman: D E A T H.
The last was the anxious laughing man, who went over to the box and threw one letter at a time until he had spelled his true name: “Thief.”
Years later, a patron at a thrift store one town over accidentally tripped on a black box. Words & Letters, $15, the label read. What had happened to the sister town soon became evident because all those crimes had spilled out of the box. Single a’s to z’s and a to lepadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimypotrimmatosil-phiotyromelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteral-ektryonoptokephaliokinklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetragalopterygon. The patrons dug out all those words and letters until only the thief’s confession was left, written in silver marker along the inside of the box’s lid: “Every word was so beautiful I had to have them all.”
Comments are closed.