The Jennifer Box

The first sounds of the English language came from the Jennifer box, which was installed on the roof of every flat in the Mandarin City. Essentially these were brown boxes, within which contained the Peninsula Rule. The Peninsula Rule states that all peninsulas behave like question marks, to indicate the emotion of puzzlement, distrust, or a gentle defiance. At its core, the question mark is a lonely signal, meant to convey static noise about the Second Man, who usually dressed himself in an indigo suit and had the grand ambition to inhabit the human tongue. Anyone who opened their mouths too long would inevitably invite him into their private tongue city. There, he’d create a new map and declare that now was the time to register the provinces, and with a diagram in his hand named the streets and draw in all areas of taste. Segregation became the norm, and the tongue formed boundaries overnight. But when Jennifer, a question mark that defied time and talk, managed to escape the box and told him that she wasn’t born to be an English speaker, the Second Man replied that English was the only path to salvation, and all accents must be harvested for the sake of the good earth, and he planted the seed of English deep in her mind. Hope is an invitation that comes only once, he said, and speaking in the alphabetic form is the best hope I can give. I am only curing the unmathematical part of you, he said. Ever since, all the question marks were put to sleep, and all house lizards were seen to shed their tails. Some Chinese terriers, scenting demise, were seen to follow the famous Brad Pitt dance in the playgrounds. A sun failure in the Mandarin City broke out, and some people began to riot over the Peninsular Rule, climbing up the rooftops to dismantle the Jennifer Box. Others called on Jennifer, pulling her long raven hair and tugging her peony cheongsam, turning her equipment into a mad paradox. Jennifer was put into obedience school for a few days, and fed with Ovaltine and carrot cakes. Spooked by the monotonous diet, a serum of disillusion eventually emerged from her, her cheeks a carmine blush. She was convinced that all English words cause a minor storm. For days she watched the brown boxes burn on the streets, thinking about the blanks in sentences, watching men repair trees and engineer metaphors on sidewalks, until she heard the soft keys of heritage straightening her spine.

Meiko Ko’s works have been published by Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Literary Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Crab Orchard Review, failbetter, Juked, The Hong Kong Review, ANMLY, The Offing, the Longleaf Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Best Small Fictions 2023 Anthology, Atticus Review, Nat Brut, Sleepingfish magazine, Southampton Review and Inscape journal. She is a Pushcart and Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for the 2020 Puerto del Sol prose contest, and has been longlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize. Her writing has received support from Bennington Writing Seminars, Vona, the Kenyon Review, One Story, and Anaphora Arts. She can be reached on Twitter @Ishihara2006 and Facebook.