“They have been friends all their lives, living in close quarters in a typesetter’s drawer.”

JUNE 4, 2024

characters

A small cluster of movable type, all of them punctuation marks, including:
Comma, Period, Colon, Semicolon, Question Mark, Exclamation Mark, Ellipsis, Hyphen, En Dash, Em Dash, Parenthesis (a pair, P1 and P2), Quotation Marks (two pairs: Q1 and Q2 are double quotation marks; Q3 and Q4 are single quotation marks), Apostrophe, and a few others.

They all have the same square, antique, and smudged appearance. One has to look closely (and, for an inexperienced observer, to seek assistance with a mirror) to identify them correctly.

Their speaking voices vary but have the same dull metal timbre.

They have been friends all their lives, living in close quarters in a typesetter’s drawer. They have some acquaintances: letters in both upper case and lower case, but letters, though profoundly superficial, tend to act profoundly literate; and numbers, that most pompous band of brothers, who are good at inflating their values.

Punctuation marks are known for their acute sense of position, precision, and purpose, which is sometimes threatened by the world at large that is prone to imposition, imprecision, and purposelessness/fake purposefulness.

✺✺✺

Curtain rises. An uncluttered space. Dusk. An etching of a Gutenberg press is barely visible on the wall. The types are sitting in an imperfect circle, reminiscent of Alice and her friends at their infamous caucus race.

colon Attention, please.

The punctuation marks are talking with and over one another. No one seems to hear colon.

colon May I have your attention, please?

ellipsis You’re repeating yourself.

colon It’s my job to direct attention.

ellipsis If you truly want attention, you should say something unexpected.

colon Like what?

ellipsis Like this. (In a voice that must be raised for ellipsis, which still sounds subdued) Inattention, please, may I have your inattention?

No one gives their inattention to ellipsis.

colon If they don’t give you their attention, how can you expect them to give you their inattention?

ellipsis But I thought our discussion today was about the world’s inattention to us. To understand others’ inattention, we must understand our own first.

colon I’m afraid that’s not how the world operates.

ellipsis How does the world operate?

colon The world operates on misunderstanding, not understanding, and pretend-understanding.

ellipsis I don’t believe you. How do you know?

colon I simply do. Don’t forget that I often preside where officiality is needed, while you, my dear friend, you never have a chance to study the world.

ellipsis I mingle with poets, and you must allow that poets know the deeper truths of human hearts.

colon Poets? They are hardly our friends. They cannot afford to be.

ellipsis Why not?

colon Can they afford to pay attention to us? Can they afford to pay for anything these days?

ellipsis Attention is not money.

colon Shhhhhh. Don’t let others overhear you. That alone will mark you as antiquated. And irrelevant. Attention, just so you know, is money these days. (Not giving ellipsis an opportunity to counterargue, colon raises his voice again.) May I have your attention, please?

Various conversations continue. ellipsis walks around the circle, stopping next to each of the punctuation marks and scrutinizing them. By and by the circle, discomfited by the too-close attention from ellipsis, turns quiet.

colon Attention, my friends.

ellipsis (refrains from speaking, and then to himself ) Ah, the lost art of omitting the obvious . . .

comma (overhears ellipsis) I hope this is not the first time you recognize your existential crisis?

ellipsis . . . ?

comma Stating the obvious is one of the surest ways to stay relevant, in case you forget.

ellipsis I didn’t forget . . . only because I didn’t know. And surely that is not true. If relevance is about stating the obvious . . .

exclamation mark (thundering) Surely it is true!

ellipsis frowns, and then retreats to a corner, nursing his silence.

colon (to the circle) Ah, yes, friends, let me remind you all: we have been discussing the pressing issue of relevance. We are, unlike letters and numbers, increasingly facing a fate of being misused, abused, and worse, rejected as being superfluous.

period Words and numbers will disagree with that statement. I’m around them often. They complain about being misused and abused.

colon But they haven’t yet been discarded as useless, have they? We contend with the fate of being erased.

quotation mark (Q1) Some of us have been plagued by our erasability for years now . . .

quotation mark (Q2) . . . and yet we have stayed unflappable and prevailed.

comma (to no one in particular) Tell that to my Oxford cousin—he’s the most unflappable creature but that doesn’t help in his case. Half—no, more than half—of the world don’t even know of his existence these days.

quotation mark (Q3) As long as words think of themselves as important and quotable, we shall believe in our relevance . . .

quotation mark (Q4) . . . just as we shall trust the necessity of punctuation as long as words don’t want to lose their sanity.

period (to question mark) Do you think they ever speak without finishing each other’s sentence?

question mark I’m afraid that is not a legitimate question.

period You haven’t realized that illegitimate questions are what carry the world these days?

question mark I know that reality more acutely than anyone. Rhetorical questions are annoying enough to test one’s endurance, but oh, the agony and the embarrassment of those illegitimate questions! Empty questions wearing the emperor’s new clothes. Convictions posing as taunting questions. Questions that should rather end with you-know-who (pointing to exclamation mark, who is excitable, so it is wise not to mention his name). What happened to the good old times when real questions begot real answers?

period Or real answers begot real questions. I suppose people like statements more than questions now.

question mark Which means you don’t really have to worry about being made redundant.

exclamation mark Neither do I!

semicolon Please lower your voice. You always give me a headache.

exclamation mark (whispers loudly to hyphen, who happens to be sitting next to him) What a grump he is! He doesn’t know he’s caused more headaches than any one of us.

hyphen (morosely) I wish I were in his shoes. I wish I were as learned as he is.

exclamation mark Learned, my ass!

hyphen But look at it from my angle. I am a joiner, Semicolon is a joiner, too. Nobody takes him for granted as they do me.

semicolon (who has been paying close attention to this side discussion) And yet you are at no risk of going extinct. You see, I work like a logician; you work like a welder. The world can make do without me, but not you.

hyphen You are being an elitist. And you have no right to be.

question mark Might it be that he confused you with your cousins, Em Dash and En Dash?

semicolon I am not confused. It’s not my job to be confused.

hyphen (whispering to himself ) Aye, it’s your job to be confusing.

colon Attention, friends. To proceed efficiently, we need to establish an order.

parenthesis (P1) We second that. Orders (established or unestablished or incapable of being established) have always been our raison d’être.

parenthesis (P2) And yet we feel that it is important to remember that the world is not run on orders, but on disorders (some of them are stabilized, others are destabilizing).

comma All these parentheticals! I motion for a simpler discussion.

semicolon As befitting your lightweight status.

apostrophe (clears throat and speaks with pauses and hesitation) Friends, uh, friends, if you kindly allow me to put in a few words—I won’t take long, I won’t put in too many words—but with your kind permission, I recommend that we confront our dilemma collectively, rather than emphasising our individualities.

quotation mark (Q1) Already that is a statement erring on being exclusive. We (pointing to Q2) neither emphasize nor care for individuality.

quotation mark (Q2) We recognise the merit of duality and dualism.

exclamation mark Quiet! Let Apostrophe speak!

apostrophe Thank you, thank you, my friend. (To Q1 and Q2) I apologize to you. I’ve been taught by my grandfather and my father that our job is to shorten rather than to lengthen, to contract rather than to expand, and sometimes when a thought becomes a shortcut, precision is at risk.

colon Kindly proceed to the point.

apostrophe Yes, yes, let me be quick before more mistakes and more opinions arise. Sometimes when your job is to be brief in your worldly presence, you tend to be expansive in your dreaming. I hope I’m not alone in this . . .

exclamation mark Some of us never have the luxury of time to dream! We are on call around the clock!

ellipsis (to himself) I don’t see the point of speaking aloud any dream.

apostrophe Yes, thank you all for your opinions. I promise to be quick. I’ve been pondering the problem of staying relevant. It behooves us to remember that there was a time when words existed without us . . .

ellipsis And one day they will do so again . . .

exclamation mark Nonsense! The words would run on so without us! The world would be pure chaos without us!

period Without me, perhaps, but I would say the world would be a saner place without keeping someone like you on call twenty-four-seven.

apostrophe (cutting in lest more opinions arise, and speaking more eloquently) You see, this is precisely the problem. We tend to emphasize our individual roles, and that’s a caucus race that goes nowhere. What I would like to suggest is that we ought to think of ourselves as a unit and take up a noun collectively. For instance, porpoises and fish go by schools, which automatically requires some respect from unschooled minds. A shiver of sharks and a murder of crows send a chill down anyone’s back. A thunder of hippos and a pride of lions cannot be ignored. A parliament of owls and a wisdom of rooks come with their innate authority. I think it would bring us some overdue attention and respect if we can settle for a good collective noun. For instance, a wisdom of punctuation marks.

quotation mark (Q1) That feels like plagiarizing.

quotation mark (Q2) Unless we put a pair of quotation marks around the word wisdom to acknowledge the borrowing. Though that could easily take up a hint of mocking.

quotation mark (Q3) Which would turn us into a foolery of punctuation marks. Since I’m the one to say it aloud, why not call ourselves a foolery of punctuation marks?

quotation mark (Q4) It has a nice ring, quite Shakespearean.

question mark What about a drift of punctuation marks? I always like when people get the drift of something . . . it makes my job easy.

semicolon Too flimsy; too insubstantial; too self-defeating.

period Besides, a drift of anything belongs to the officialese of letters. They like to create drifts—often imprecisely. We like precision.

question mark An equation of punctuation marks? An ordinal of punctuation marks?

period If you want to hear the protest from numbers. And they have infinite ways of protesting.

parenthesis (P1) An embrace of punctuation marks?

period Too familiar.

colon A bearing of punctuation marks.

em dash A procession of punctuation marks.

en dash A run of punctuation marks.

comma A senate of punctuation marks, a brotherhood of punctuation marks, an ensemble of punctuation marks.

period No, all those words have their indefensible flaws. We should call ourselves a community of punctuation marks. I’ve noticed that community is a versatile word these days. Invincible, too.

question mark You may as well add an impact of punctuation marks, a synergy of punctuation marks, a strategy of punctuation marks, an alignment of punctuation marks, a challenge of punctuation marks, an authenticity of punctuation marks. They are all popular words these days.

semicolon I object. They are enough for me to think that we should just bow out of history and leave the words tangled in their stupidity.

comma Maybe we should go for the obvious ones. No one can argue against the obvious.

question mark Such as?

comma A hope of punctuation marks. A love of punctuation marks. A solidarity of punctuation marks. An empowerment of punctuation marks.

A long, long pause.

hyphen A caution of punctuation marks. A warning of punctuation marks.

ellipsis We will never come to an agreement . . .

hyphen A gaggle of punctuation marks. A squabble of punctuation marks.

period Let’s stop. This is a fool’s errand.

colon And yet it’s no more a fool’s errand than other worldly proceedings, which begs the question whether we are not foolish enough.

ellipsis I have a proposal . . .

comma Don’t propose. I can always offer a different proposal, whatever you propose.

ellipsis . . .

period . . .

question mark . . .

hyphen . . .

Dusk has turned into night. The Gutenberg press blends into the grey background.

ellipsis (to self) I’ve never felt so relevant as at this moment.

apostrophe Apostrophe!

exclamation mark It’s not your job to be excitable.

apostrophe I apologize. Only I think I’ve found a solution. Since it’s unlikely that we can come to an agreed collective noun for ourselves, we should follow an age-old practice and call ourselves an apostrophe of punctuation marks, just as Newton’s laws of motion or Euclidean geometry.

period Aha. That’s your plan all along, isn’t it, to put yourself into a position of leading us?

exclamation mark This is preposterous!

apostrophe Allow me to elaborate, friends. There is nothing preposterous with my idea. How did the history of punctuation marks begin? It was the need for some space between words and sentences. We are, in the end, a collective of placeholders.

quotation mark (Q1) A placeholder of punctuation marks?

quotation mark (Q2) That sounds redundant.

apostrophe Any noun that goes before our names would be all right, as theoretically it’s only a placeholder. In that sense an apostrophe of punctuation marks is as good as any other possibility. I’ve always dreamed of being a little more important than my puny self allows, so, my friends, why not indulge me for once, since the original idea is mine?

question mark Is there a term to your position?

colon We should establish an agreed term. It can’t be like a chief justice of some court.

semicolon Or royalty.

period And we should establish an order of rotation so we each can have our names used. A period of punctuation marks—that sounds rather appealing, don’t you think? With a nostalgic tone.

em dash and en dash (nodding at each other) And we will ask for a double term. A dash of punctuation marks!

An eruption of different voices from around the circle. Curtain falls while the conversation continues.

This is a story from A Cage Went in Search of a Bird published by Catapult. Every purchase made via The Dial’s Bookshop supports our magazine’s editors and writers.