what's in a name?

“Maddening”, is how Zeuraxgqoi describes it.

He dreams the strangest dreams at night. Silent burials in unmarked graves. Rows of faucets dripping in deaf space. Deadening leaves falling quietly on cracked sidewalks. One by one, night after night.

From the outside, Zeuraxgqoi lives an ordinary life. He has a child with an extraordinary name, like his own. He takes the metro to work every day and lives on the seventeenth floor.

He knows his neighbors’ names. Every single one of them. Their childrens’ too.

“Anonymity is death”, he moans. Nobody ever asks him his name - at home, at work or anywhere in between. Either they all know or they don’t care. Or maybe they’re jealous. In any case, nobody calls him anything.

He shows up at their door regularly – even when no one’s home.

Occasionally, they knock at his door - asking for this or that, asking about someone, to deliver something or to collect something else. Yet they never address him, not once.

Perhaps it’s too difficult to pronounce, he consoles himself. But then, they could use a nickname if they wished. Zeurax. Zeur. Or even a corruption – say Zeus, to make matters easier. He would be happy with Z. Maybe they don’t dare.

At other times, he surmises people are used to call each other by surnames – Mr. Rtl next door, the Ms. Psy across the hallway, Prof. Tzv downstairs. As it happens, Z doesn’t have a surname. He’s not sure he would like one either.

What’s the point, asks he? Isn’t one name good enough, especially if it is special enough – chosen carefully enough?

In fact, he finds the whole business of surnames positively anachronistic – in a modern metropolis like ours, he avers, there exists neither imperative nor incentive to announce your forebears’ trade from generations ago, or the village they arrived from, or that odd physical anomaly of an unfortunate outlier in one’s genealogy, or some such inconsequential artifact from one’s distant lineage.

A well-chosen name is enough, he asserts, to identify each individual uniquely. In any case, surnames don’t really solve the problem – just how many young Master Jrrrh Wfg’s had entered the city’s birth-roll over the last decade – exactly three-hundred and eighty-seven, last time he queried the MetroBase (which is something of a hobby for Z, not surprising for someone who happens to be a stickler for facts; he spends hours late into the night collecting interesting demographic patterns).

Naming trends (for first names, of course) these days come about almost always by accident, results of typographical errors while mindlessly following palpable trends – a consequence of the near-extinction of genuine trend-setters in society (something akin to changes in the genetic code via mutation only, in the absence of any other evolutionary pressures).

Even if a certain phonetic pattern came into vogue, as it often does with the metro’s singularly trend-obsessed populace, one could always mimic the process of mutation itself– a permutation here or a substitution there would make all the difference – a happier medium between numb conformity and real uniqueness, however lacking in it’s celebration of originality. Even such tame mischief is hard to come by these days, Z laments.

He often slips into full-blown reveries during empty intervals at work. Z shares a not very uncommon relationship with his job with many a denizen of the great city – he savors the leisure it affords him although he finds the actual work crushingly vacuous – as a result, he constantly tries to get by through lack of trying and doing as little as possible without raising alarm with his superiors, who curiously happen to be quite satisfied with both his efficacy and efficiency – a sure nod to the reluctant yet undeniable hold Z’s conscience has on everything he undertakes. Besides, his command of symbol-manipulation and capacity for numbers, figures and facts confers on him a certain effortless advantage in his field of work.

Our story begins right in the middle of one such reverie - on a cloudy, windy, cool April morning outside. Z stares into the gray sky from his desk behind the half-open window, his swivel-chair turned a hundred-and-eighty degrees. He sits motionless, his salt-and-pepper hair and tanned, scruffy neck visible from the door and the tall stack of packages on the desk as it rises above the back of the chair.

He is dimly aware of a steady drumbeat from the street below as the swirling rhythm of the invisible drummer’s hands lulls him into lucid meditation. He pays no heed to it’s source – he hears it every Wednesday morning, roughly an hour before noon. He is given to spells of vertigo looking down heights (especially from windows as low as this one; the six-foot sills in his apartment are no accident) and he has never allowed himself the idle luxury of climbing down the stairs just to check on a street-performer.

Nomenclature, he repeats, is key. Without it, we would be lost in a sea of faces, numbers, features, struggling descriptions. The very existence of language necessitates it. We don’t just name people – every object or idea known to man is named. Almost every meaningful pattern (a sentence, a paragraph, an entire book) in any language is merely a collection of names strung together with ligaments of prepositions and sockets of conjunctions, its viscera clustered and demarcated into semantic organs by the membranes of punctuation, each cleverly maneuvered into position by the handy levers of articles and pronouns, the design of the entire organism on all scales governed by the genetic code of syntax.

“Uhhrrrgghhm”, a throat cleared at the door.

His spell broken, he turned to look. Mr. Qgn was standing, hands in his pockets.

“Look, didn’t mean to barge in like that but someone again...”.

Z rose from the now-spinning chair and without saying a word, stood in Q’s face with a somber look of resigned understanding, followed by a barely perceptible shrug, an arched eyebrow and a heavy sigh.

“Very well then”, Q turned back and started down the hallway.

The two entered the mailroom through a carelessly-painted blue door. A rubber-matted ramp led up to a circular wooden platform, its perimeter lined with roughly a dozen shiny metallic cylindrical chutes that came all the way down from openings in the ceiling. Each column was tapped at regularly spaced slots, spouting into a stack of card-sized shelves, together suspended in the still, musty air like a stretched-out accordion.

One of the platters was dripping. A dimly fluorescent greenish-yellow fluid streaked out from the corners of an envelope...

(to be continued)

the amulet

This story is about a river borne of an amulet.

The smooth, round amulet came to pass in a curiously circular fashion. It was found in a dry river bed by a little boy who was looking to grow his collection of pretty pebbles.

When the little boy grew up a little, he became a young lad and before long, he grew tired of the pursuits of his boyhood. He now liked a pretty girl much more than he did his pretty pebbles, which lay half-forgotten inside a small wooden box buried under a heap of old toys in his bedroom.

Then one night, while he slept, the amulet flashed and within seconds, lit up the dark room like a brilliant sun. The lad awoke to the blinding light surrounding him.

The next morning, he swam ashore.

Judgement Day

“Who in his right mind would dare say such a thing?”, exclaimed Klös, leaning forward, under his breath.

“Well, people do act strange sometimes...strange to the point of funny. Perhaps if things hadn't been so dreadful this time?”, Schädelgräber seemed to concur, hesitantly.

The object of their derision stood up at that moment. Her name was Marta Grau. A portly matron who looked older than her forty-five years, she wore a black dress that was typical of housekeepers and ladies' maids in her day. She had gray eyes with fat, sleepy eyelids that blinked slowly as she listened to the council's words.

The council consisted of four people – four elderly, bespectacled gentlemen in drab, respectable garb, with sparse tufts of snow-white hair standing on their skulls. In fact, they appeared eerily alike from where she stood in the dimly-lit room, sitting evenly-spaced in one row across a long polished oak table, raised barely a foot above the rest of the floor.

The only light in the room came from a circular skylight on the twelve-foot ceiling directly above Ms. Grau's stand. A solitary fan with long, claw-like blades, black against the light, loomed a few inches off-center from a hook and flapped in the cold, still air like an ominous, winged creature, it's shadows flitting isochronously across Marta's composed face.

“Yes, Herren. I saw both the Kürbiskopf children. Hans was carrying Herr Schilling's head in both his hands. Little Aliz carried the sickle with blood all over it.”

The air suddenly felt colder as the entire room drew a sharp breath all at once.

Professor Lehrer's nose itched. His clammy hands swiftly withdrew from the flaccid pockets of his gray coat, which looked worn beyond it's years. The pouches looked like rabbit ears, despite their leather lining. In a deft bit of orchestration, the fingers of his left hand reached for his nose and delicately tugged at the offending follicle hanging off the inner wall of the right nostril, while the right hand cleverly shielded the grisly act, all within the span of a single, feigned cough.

Inconspicuous as it was, the cough broke the silence.

Herr Schaufel cleared his throat.

“Fraulein Grau, I truly hope you realize the gravity of your statement. Let's not forget even for a moment that these are little children we are talking about here...”.

“Barely out of kindergarten, I might add!”, Herr Pflugrind finished.

“ I have nothing more to say... or less, Herren.”, Marta said calmly.

A faint groan escaped Herr Schaufel's mouth.
The church bell rang outside.

Marta sat still in a gray wooden chair with padded leather armrests which she did not use. She stared at her lap now, her hands on her knees.

“Marta, we have known each other all our lives. All those dreadful masks and costumes of yours on Fastnacht and Walpurgisnacht, how can one forget?”, Frau Grün said, as a faint smile broke on her creased, ashen face.

Her eyes softened as she remembered,“ You nursed my first-born for two years. And even little Gretchen for a few months. I mean, you are family to us– it breaks my heart to see you caught up in these horrible goings-on”.

Marta looked up and blinked exactly twice.

“I have always rebuked people who said odd things about you. Especially when little Erich passed on, peace be to his innocent soul. But I always defended you like my own sister. It was all God's will and Marta is a good kind soul, I told them.”. Her eyes were moist.

“Helga, I am grateful to you for trusting me.”, it was Marta's turn to comfort.

“I wish I could trust your word this time. But the very thought of... their own mother and father...”, she suddenly covered her eyes with her tiny, frail hands.

Marta lowered her gaze again and pursed her lips.

At that moment, Herr Pflugrind stepped into the room. His eyes surveyed the two women's faces and, in an instant, surmised the content of their dialogue.

“Ah! I see that Fraulein Gray has been an object of much sympathy.” he announced even before he took the chair right next to Frau Grün's.

“But I'm afraid no amount of sympathy will be enough to absolve anyone this time around. Marta, if I may address you so informally, we all know that you are no stranger to being a subject of rumor and gossip. Perhaps all this sympathy is well-deserved, but the townsfolk simply demand facts and justice.”

As he spoke, he occasionally cast furtive sideways glances at the narrow chink separating the heavy red curtains covering the only window in the room, as if he saw someone or something looking in.

“The crime, if one may call it that – perhaps that is too mild a word to describe what has taken place, cannot be explained away as an accident or an act of vengeance. In fact, there is nothing at all remotely human about this act.”, Herr Pflugrind went on haltingly.


Marta caught Herr Pflugrind's attention wavering. She looked towards the window and noticed that the narrow visible section of the glass pane was misted over milky-white, except for an oval, palm-sized formation of thick dew-drops, arranged in neat rows, nearly a foot above the sill.

(to be continued... or not?)