Logoptera

LOGOPTERA

by Diana Dima

(Content Warnings: discrimination)

At Tialko, every word Nadia says makes people stare. 

This morning, somebody mixed honey in her oatmeal as a prank, so that she couldn’t talk for hours. The words stuck in her throat and died there with a rasp of wings. Laughter and whispers followed her – not just students, she thought; teachers, too. When her voice came back, she made a point to raise her hand in Dr. Kamen’s class. She spoke for so long that her words swarmed, glittering and buzzing, alighting on people’s heads, until somebody thought to open the window.

In the row below, Adel had caught one of the words between his fingers. It flapped its wings with that high ticking noise they made when they were scared, and Adel squished it with his nails, head turned, looking right at Nadia. Even though it felt like getting the wind kicked out of her, she shrugged.

•••

When she walks past the library after class, Nadia feels the tug, the familiar hook turning in her chest. Usually, she ignores it; she walks faster, keeping her head down. But something is different today—a recklessness, a flutter of wings in her throat. The library looms in the fog, its front doors wide open like jaws, and Nadia finds herself walking through them.

It is here, the thing that pulls her: down the corridor, across the maze of bookshelves, behind a plain door with a framed sign that reads Students: access only with written permission.

Nadia stops. The door is locked, and she wouldn’t risk it anyway. She’s worked too hard to be here; she won’t take any chances, though the pull is so strong it makes her light-headed.

“Are you okay, Nadia?”

Dr. Kamen is smiling down at her, face gray like a statue’s in the dim light of the library. “I heard what happened yesterday.”

“I’m fine.”

Nadia’s words hover in the air, and Dr. Kamen watches them as she talks. “I know how difficult it must be for you, being the first of your kind at Tialko. Tell me, have you taken any lessons in wingless speech?”

Nadia shakes her head. 

“It can be learned, you know. To keep them down. It’d make it so much easier for you to speak in class, or anywhere, really. After a while, nobody would even notice anymore. Why don’t you come to my office in the afternoon? I don’t claim to be the best to teach this, but I can help with the basics.”

She seems to take Nadia’s shrug as a yes, and leaves her standing by the locked door, throat prickling with unspoken words.

•••

At first, Nadia doesn’t think she will go to Dr. Kamen’s office. She skips breakfast and is first in the auditorium for Linguistics. Slowly, every row fills up but hers, which remains empty from end to end. Nadia doesn’t talk in class; she doesn’t talk at all, though she can hear others whispering about her in the corridors and in the lunch line. In the afternoon, she finds herself knocking on Dr. Kamen’s door.

“I’m glad you came,” Dr. Kamen says.

Nadia sits on the edge of a worn armchair, nails digging into her palms. She lets Dr. Kamen’s words wash over her, invisible but somehow heavier for it.

The first step in wingless speech, Dr. Kamen tells her, is separation. She must learn to separate her words from their physical manifestations, their insects. Think of them as invaders, corrupting her voice. Think of them as unwanted guests. It’ll make it easier to swallow them back, let only the sound fly out.

Nadia tries. She is not sure she wants to, but she does as Dr. Kamen said, and purses her lips, and tries to hold back the winged things. Her ears pound with frantic ticking, and all that comes out of her mouth is a strangled sound. She can’t do it. Her mouth opens wide and the words fly out all jumbled at Dr. Kamen’s face.

She swats them away. “Let’s try again with a little help. I’ll make some tea for you.”

While Dr. Kamen puts the kettle on, Nadia takes a deep breath. The office smells musty under a layer of incense, and it makes her queasy. On the desk, next to the stone sculpture of a bird, lies a set of keys. Nadia picks them up and reads the colorful tags. Two of them are labeled Library.

“Now, this may be a bit uncomfortable, but it’ll help,” Dr. Kamen says, stirring the tea with her back turned. “It’s only a tablespoon of honey to help keep the words down.”

Nadia’s stomach turns. It’s all suddenly too much, the lesson and the smell and the honey, the honey again.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Kamen, but I can’t stay.” That reckless flutter awakens in her again, strong and deep, a foreign heart beating in her chest. She slides the two library keys off their ring. “Thank you for the lesson.”

•••

The keys weigh Nadia down. When she walks into the library at night, pushing the heavy doors open with a creak, it feels like crossing an invisible boundary. She’s never done anything like this before; the audacity of it makes her cheeks burn. She can’t afford to break rules, to get caught.

She thinks of her family, of the day they talked about the new scholarship for Logoptera speakers at Tialko. Her brother was too young to understand, and his many questions darted through the air. “You should apply,” Nadia’s mother told her, but her eyes were sad. Was she sad because Nadia might leave, or because she herself had stayed? Perhaps she, too, had grown up with stories of the university’s art galleries, its greenhouses, its vast and mysterious library. Perhaps she, too, had dreamed of a way in, only there had been none at all back then.

The library pulls Nadia onwards, to the plain door at the back of the hall, the keys sweat-slick in her hand. When she reaches for the door handle, voices ring out behind her. 

“Told you it’s not locked.” Adel and a few other boys have stumbled through the front door, and Nadia ducks behind a bookcase. The boys are loud, careless. They could get her caught.

Nadia waits for them to disappear between the shelves, their laughter echoing through the hall, before slipping back out into the night.

•••

“We never finished our lesson,” Dr. Kamen says, leaning over Nadia’s table. The teahouse is loud, warm, swirling with steam. It is the only place on campus that reminds Nadia of home.

“I’m very grateful for all you’ve done for me, Dr. Kamen,” Nadia says. She chooses her words carefully. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I want to continue.” The words hang in the air, wings catching the afternoon light. Dr. Kamen pulls up a chair.

“I know it’s difficult. Trust me, I understand. I was one of the first women admitted to Tialko. It took a long time for things to get better.”

Nadia sips her tea without looking up.

“I was in a faculty meeting today,” Dr. Kamen continues. “There’s a proposal to make wingless speech a requirement for all students. If you ask me, it’ll be official soon. There’s really no better time to take lessons.”

Dr. Kamen gets up.

“You’ve got a place here, Nadia. Don’t let it go to waste.”

After Dr. Kamen leaves, Nadia watches the students huddling together around small tables. Through the fogged-up windows she can only make out dark patches of buildings, and one among them pulls at her like a hook sunk into her chest.

•••

It’s not even dark yet, but she walks into the library with her back straight, her head high. There is nobody behind the reception desk, nobody in her way, and she makes straight for the plain door, keys in hand, finger on the smaller one, impatient. At this hour, blue light weaves lacy patterns across the bookshelves.

Nadia turns the key, opens the door. At the bottom of rough stone steps, a light flickers. She climbs down, down, until the steps end and she finds herself inside a circular room, a second library, unlike any she has seen before.

In the candlelight, everything looks half real: the tall bookcases made of bone; the volumes bound in skin, with faces for covers, jewels set in empty eye sockets; the intricate tapestries woven in hair; the deep-red inkwells, the candles in their bone holders, the insect boards covering the walls.

In the middle of the back wall, an empty board.

When she draws closer, she sees that the insects are words, pins through their thoraces, wings spread, drab in death and crumpled like paper, each specimen labeled with a handwritten transliteration. She spots mistakes—night instead of dusk, city instead of mountain; once dead, the words can be hard to tell apart. Below the boards there are plaques bearing names, names like hers, and she wonders how they came to be here. Were they hunted? Did they come willingly, eager to give up their words? Did they, too, feel something tugging at their chest?

The empty board bears Nadia’s name. She runs her fingers over the brass plaque, feels the words shiver in her throat.

The library tightens around her. She didn’t notice how elastic the walls are, how soft the floor, sagging under her feet. Slowly, gently, the room pulsates, as though behind its walls lie beating organs, throbbing veins. Nadia’s stomach twists. She turns away from the insect boards and runs back up the stairs and through the door.

•••

Although there are no classes the next day, Nadia doesn’t leave the campus. In the hazy afternoon, the buildings have taken on a pinkish hue, rows of windows glistening like teeth. The alleys are empty. Every now and then, Nadia whispers a word and lets it rest on her finger for a moment, before it flies to wherever it is words go. 

She thinks of her brother’s first word: how it made him hiccup, and how he stood up in his cot to grab at the glittering thing; how her father’s eyes shone, and all their words mingled in the air, so they couldn’t tell which was whose anymore. Here, in the shadow of the library, Nadia’s family feels farther away than ever, as though there is more than distance between them; as though some important thread connecting them has snapped. 

When news came about Nadia’s scholarship, her mother worried. “We’re all proud of you,” she told Nadia, “but the choice is yours. You don’t have to go.” Her words always had a golden tint to their wings, even when they were bitter. “It’ll be harder than you think,” she said, but Nadia knew that if her mother could have gone to Tialko, she would have. Her mother had never been afraid.

In the cool of the library, Nadia runs her fingers over the shelves and wonders if she’s grown scared. She wonders if she’s changed, and whether that’s what she wanted, craved like a molting, back when she only dreamed about Tialko. She wonders if she’s ready for what she needs to do.

She knows Dr. Kamen was right about her. Nadia’s place is here, and she won’t give it up for anything.

•••

The secret library pulls Nadia down the stone steps as though it’s grown impatient. The bones of the bookcases rattle and the books turn on their shelves and the rugs crawl across the floor and a ticking noise pounds through Nadia’s feet, steady, soft, all the way to her chest.

She stands in front of the empty insect board that bears her name, and she thinks about separation.

She must separate the words from their glittering, fluttering bodies.

She must separate herself from the words.

Eyes closed, she breathes deeply. She feels the squirming panic in her chest, the thrumming of unspoken words. The library leans in to listen, to urge, to take. It would take her whole if it could.

She will save herself. She will separate the wanted from the unwanted, the unwinged from the winged. Like Tialko has separated her from her kind; like she herself has done by coming here. She will keep her pitch, her intonation; and maybe a faint buzz will still trail her every sentence; but there will be no wings.

She opens her mouth, and Tialko reaches deep inside her, tightens a fist around her hive. She lets the word-insects go.

As though stricken by an invisible hand, they fall into a heap at her feet. Nadia watches some of them float up again, inert, and they feel like someone else’s words, arranging themselves on the board, impaled on evenly spaced pins, above labels written in neat cursive. The wings, unfolded, have dulled, the last glimmers wearing off like embers. It is difficult, already, to remember how they shone, how they fluttered.

Nadia has never experienced a silence like this.

“Home,” she whispers, and the sound dissolves in the air as though it never was.

“Tialko,” she says, more loudly, and the library whispers back: Tialko.

When she walks out and locks the door behind her, Nadia knows she will never again come back. She will try her hardest to forget what lies buried in the heart of Tialko, just as she hopes Tialko will forget who she was, let her walk unnoticed through its halls.

•••

It works and it doesn’t, at the same time.

It is, of course, easier now to speak up in class, though some of the zest has gone out of Nadia’s answers, and she rarely goes on for long. Still, Dr. Kamen is pleased. She’s taken Nadia under her wing and will often meet her in the teashop to talk about her studies. And even though Adel and his friends still whisper behind her back, they never got to her, not really, and even less so now.

It is only the approach of summer that unsettles Nadia, with its open-ended weeks, its empty campus, everyone returning home like lost bees. When Dr. Kamen offers her summer work at Tialko, Nadia doesn’t even think before accepting. 

The difficult part, then, is writing the letter. Nadia tries to write as though her words are still winged, with all the shimmer she can remember, but she worries her parents will be able to tell, even so. She makes it short. She misses them all, she writes, and it’s the truth, though she’s also wary of them, now; or rather, wary of herself back home. I’ll visit another time, she writes. She doesn’t sign her name.

When she goes to post the letter, she stops by the library, looming dark against the spring sky, and there is no tug, no hook turning in her chest. In the crowd of students rushing to class, Nadia looks and moves and talks like any of them, though none of them can know how she feels. Skin stretched taut over hollowness. Silence pressing on her bones. 

She lifts her chin and walks on as though she has not a care in the world. 

As though she belongs.