Wordsmith, Chapter 1
Gentlefriends-
I wrote a story. And I drew some pictures. They go together. Read it?
Lovage,
Dan
Wordsmith
Chapter 1
Billy Oscar (né: William Aldritch Oscar) was a wordsmith. Pounding over an iron anvil, he forged letters and sounds into white-hot words and hung them gently on hooks as they cooled.
I have to stop writing Billy thought. And although he genuinely wanted to, even as the idea flitted across his mind, Billy had already hammered two sentences worth of new words. Metal scrap lay at his feet- impeachable evidence of the hasty and impassioned sense of creation with which Billy was forced to live. Billy inherited this job from his father. It was the sort of job that traveled with a bloodline, not a post-collegiate internship-turned-career.
Wordsmithing is exquisitely dangerous. When was the last time you took it upon yourself to invent a word? Likely, you’ve never met a wordsmith, nor known their post existed. Billy spent his days locked in the shop, tripping over new contractions and stumbling into slang. It was his responsibility- nay, his duty to keep the fires stoked and the material pliable. Should he stop for an instant, should the heat dissipate in his heart for a moment, the metal would seize upon itself and we’d wake into a world completely decided; a life in which we have no freedom to see things as we like, only as they are known. Existence would have but one meaning; a rose smelling nothing like itself by any other name. An unbending world of definition and description. Banishment for interpretation.
Perhaps you sense the pressure with which Billy lived. It was this pressure that drove him forward. Forward, and inevitably, mad.
Holding such a secret position, Billy was considered by his friends to be jobless. Utterly and tragically unemployed. They knew he “worked from home” (their condescension, not mine), but having never seen his office, his forge, assumed him to be draining life in front of his computer. Asking him to lunch was an exercise in frustration. I can’t, I’ve got loads to do today, Billy was always busy. They assumed he was too proud to admit his desperation. They thought Billy was a waste.
And if they found themselves vexed by Billy’s refusal to take lunch breaks, it was nothing compared to the aggravation and sheer madness Billy felt when trying to explain his work to these people. What could he say? He usually led with I’m a writer, but that begged more questions about publication and style. He abstracted for a while and just claimed the mantle of Artist, something that drew even more scoffs. No one was a capital A-r-t-i-s-t. Art was a hobby. Billy was not an artist. He tried Linguist, Inventor, Architect, and Sculptor, only to be met with mouths full of laughter.
Once he yelled I’m a Wordsmith in the middle of a boozy party, but someone just removed the red plastic cup of gin from his hand and escorted him out the front door. “This is how people end up homeless and living on the streets,” his friends said.
As it was, Billy found himself with ample time alone. Solitude, while not necessary for his job, was all the better for results. The more time spent alone in his forge, the more daring his creations. Besides, Billy hardly ever spoke. Even when he dared out among friends Billy was usually forgotten at some bar or pub, relegated to a corner next to a long defunct juke box while the rest of the crowd mingled with the ease of a thousand newly greased cogs clicking away in a gigantic unseen clock. And so, despite his familial role in the creation of language as we know it, Billy was uniformly unfamiliar with its every day use. Billy was quiet.
