Free The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault Page A

onto the bottom of a drinking glass.
    “Maybe … Maybe it’s not a
story
. Maybe … maybe you should put more rum in that?”
    “I’m not a hulking frat boy like you. I’m a lightweight.”
    “I’m not a frat boy,” I said, considering whether I should be offended by
hulking
as well.
    “Sorry.”
    “But anyway. Suit yourself. I was saying. Maybe it’s real. Maybe they’re talking about a real corpse.”
    Mona gulped her drink and shook her head.
    “Wouldn’t that be cool, huh?” she said. “But no. Some of our fellow dictionary people are somewhat lacking in street smarts, but I don’t think any of them are dumb enough to kill someone and then write down little clues to drop in the cit file like little Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs. I could be wrong.”
    “Okay. Of course it probably wasn’t a
murderer
who wrote these cits. But maybe there was something shady going down. Maybe someone was secretly writing about what they knew.”
    Mona took the cit from me.
    “You know, I hadn’t even considered that possibility. Call me naive. I guess I just like to think of lexicographers as essentially a gentle people. Shall we?”
    She motioned me into the living room, small and empty but for a simple but expensive-looking black couch, a little wooden coffee table, and a tall, skinny bookcase. A single framed Ansel Adams poster hung behind the couch. On the table there were two pairs of shoeboxes.
Unchecked
was written in blue marker on two of the boxes, and
Done
written in red marker on the other two. Two of the boxes already had banded batches of cits lined up inside.
    “I made a pair of boxes for you,” she said sheepishly.
    “I see that,” I said. It was both disturbing and flattering, the mental image of Mona sitting down at her kitchen table, carefully fashioning me a set of makeshift “In” and “Out” boxes for my maximum productivity at her place. Probablyshe was doing her careful colored lettering just as I was selecting her bottle of rum.
    “Got your cits in your bag?” she asked.
    “Yup.”
    Mona sat cross-legged on the floor. She picked up a stack of cits from her little coffee table and removed the rubber band.
    “I just flip through like this, see? You barely have to look at the bottom right-hand corner to see if it’s got
‘Broken Teaglass’
written on it. See, a word like ‘melon baller’ goes by really fast. Not many cits for ‘melon baller.’ Kind of a shame, don’t you think? Anyway. No
Broken Teaglass
cits. I just band them back up, put them in the ‘Done’ box, and check off ‘melon baller’ right here.”
    She pointed at the stapled printout of 1950 words, on which she had begun a neat row of check marks, and put a star next to
maven
.
    “This won’t just help us keep track, it might also help us see if there’s a pattern to which words have
Teaglass
cits.”
    “That’s a good idea.” I sat on the couch and dumped a bunch of citations from my backpack into my “Unchecked” box. “Especially since I probably won’t be doing this in alphabetical order.”
    Mona looked like she was considering saying something else to me. Instead, she just swallowed some more rum and Coke. I picked up a thin pile of citations for
American pit bull terrier
, and started to flip through them.
    One of them was from an article entitled “Fourth of July Tragedy,” from some women’s magazine. It seemed to be from an article about a kid attacked by a dog at a picnic.
    “I can’t think of much worse of a nightmare than to see your kid mauled by a dog,” I said.
    “Don’t
read
, Billy. We’ll never get anywhere if you’re going to read everything.”
    I flipped through the rest of the pile, put a rubber band around it, and chucked it in my empty “Done” box. Mona pushed the list and pen toward me without looking up from her cits.
    Fffft. Fffft. Fffft
. She shuffled through her citations like a banker counting cash. I watched her for a moment before reaching for my next stack