My Son Thinks He's French Patrick Wensink
			House of Words Scott Tomford
			Slaves Bonnie ZoBell
			The Old In and Out Odyssey Frayn Masters
			Donald Ray Pollock Elizabeth Ellen
			Scott Tomford is currently pursuing his BFA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He has a blog called Kid Pretentious and he also reads manuscripts for A Public Space, which he encourages you to subscribe to.

Photo by Ryan Molloy

This is where we watch TV, where we entertain guests and let them add to the walls. You can see some of the words from the last dinner party on the ceiling if you look hard enough. There's this is just fabulous in the left hand corner, can you see it? Mrs. Evans said that when she saw her words first appear on the walls. When there were still parties here, we'd hire a syntax repairman to come in and clean the walls up before a party. He removed the words we don't want to see with an ice chipper; we'd make him rearrange the words we'd said to look smart and grammatically correct.

Sorry, this place is a mess. This is where we save some of the words that we've taken down, words that used to mean something, the ones worth saving. There's I Got a Good Deal... a nice little lie I told her. She loved it. There's some light-hearted ones down here too, things we've said about TV shows and hockey games, the things that were important but don't really matter. Look over there, can you believe how excited I was when the Rangers won the cup? I don't even think that's a real word! There's some things from the argument room in here too. They're here so we won't forget.

Hold on, we're about to enter the silence room... let me get a pen and paper.

This is the room that we're not allowed to talk in. She'll have a fit if she sees any of our words in here. I've been spending a lot of time in here lately. This is a quiet place to think, to stare at a blank ceiling like normal people do. You can see that our ceilings start out white. I guess that makes silence white.

This is just a little room to have fun. Sometimes when we feel silly, we'd buy a few buckets of paint and throw them at the walls, because black can be so boring. We said love, and now our love is bright green, and queasy is a dark red. We tear down the words in here about once a month, it takes hours to get rid of our words. For the most part, all it takes is a hammer and an ice pick, and little pieces of nothing or everything fall to the ground. Sometimes, though, the syntax man has to bring a crowbar and some elbow grease; some words simply refuse to disappear... some are thicker than others too. One word was so unwilling to go that the syntax man brought a blow torch, but I will not tell you what it was.

Where's that pen and paper?

Look at the words, the sentences. Everything that we said was perfect... it kind of looks like poetry, doesn't it? The moans never entered the ceiling, the I Love Yous just layered on top of one another. The syntax, the sentence flow, the grammar: I wouldn't change a thing.

I get uncomfortable when I take people in here. This is where I fought with her. You can probably find all the dirty words here, all the embarrassing insults and little things we yell about. We wouldn't argue anywhere else. Once an argument started, we'd walk in here. We yelled so much in here that the walls couldn't control our words, they start to fall and break the foundation, they started falling on us, and hitting us; the words let us know just how important they are. See this bump on the back of my head? That came from a giant asshole falling off the ceiling and joining the pile of curses that grew beneath our feet. It reminded us to stop; the falling words were trying to tell us to save ourselves. And we did, for a while at least. We took most of the words away, throw them outside. I've seen neighborhood children collect them and make word huts with them... you probably saw a few on your way over.

Where is she? Her mom's place, I think. I can picture her right now, just talking, talking, talking, waiting to see words, but nothing will come of it. Maybe she's lying in bed, thinking about the lovemaking room, of the silence room, or the colored room. Maybe every time she sees a written word, she thinks of me. She'll be back soon. Last night I saw a hut that said I don't love you anymore and I ran all the way home, fell asleep in the silence room, wishing that words didn't exist.