by Xenia Taiga

They are everywhere: their smiles, their opened gawking mouths, their voices: Hello! Hello! HELLO!

Her class is due in an hour. She has an hour to wait and she goes for an ice coffee in the cool air conditioned café. The elementary school kids are there, the shop workers at the nearby clothing stores are there, the Ayi holding the pissing kid:  Hello! Hello! HELLO!

And then she sees him: Hello! Hello! HELLO!

She is cornered. Her drink already bought. His face is in hers. He sits down at her table. “I want to know,” he says and pulls thick large books out of his bag, stacking them on the table. They tower up to her eyes.

“I want to know,” he says and pulls out his notebook, his pencil ready, looking at her with squinted eyes.

He waits.

She waits.

“Want to know what?”

“Everything,” he says. “About the English. About the words. About the everything.”

She slurps her ice coffee, surprised to find it suddenly empty. “Can you give me an example?”

“The English grammar is the hardest. Why is that? Tell me about the grammar.”

“Well, grammar can be pretty tricky, but if you…”

“The words. Why the words are difficult?”

“If you read the context of the word, you can usually find…”

“The spelling. Why the spelling so difficult?”

“It’s the English way,” she says, thinking about buying another drink, thinking about leaving.

“I want to tell you what I know.”

“Okay,” she says, bracing herself and he names all the cuss words that he knows.

F is for

C is for

S is for

A is for

“Yes, yes. I think that is quite enough…”

But he isn’t finished. He put the words in sentences.

I am f you

She is a c

He is an a

S is everywhere. Just everywhere.

Her hand goes to her head. A headache is coming on, pounding fiercely behind her eyes. He smiles at her, his mouth moving rapidly. She cuts him off, her hands go up into the air; dancing and twirling like delicate ballerinas, fluttering like butterflies.

“Let’s learn something else. Do you see this? Can you see this?” she asks, her voice rising, her smile spreading across her face as her hands go higher up in the air. “This,” she says. “This is sign language. You don’t need words, only movements. Look,” she says, her hands higher still, flapping like a bird, making shadows on the wall. “Look. You do the same. Put up your hands.”

“No, no,” he says, shaking his head. He pulls out The Oxford English Dictionary, as thick and heavy as a pile of bricks, and slams it on the table.

“The F. That F. How do you spell? How do you pronounce?” he asks, flipping through the pages as her hands become smaller and smaller, the shadows disappearing like old puppets discarded and abandoned at the bottom of a forgotten toy chest.

Editor’s Note on Linguists Beware:

Linguists Beware is not the first piece by Xenia Taiga published in Eastlit. She has previously been published in Eastlit as follows:

• The Prostitutes’ Cat published in the January 2013 issue of Eastlit.
• Mirage published in Eastlit March 2013.
• Two Poems were published in the June issue of Eastlit.
• The Judicial Educational Committee of Great Importance was published in the September issue of Eastit.