Sticks and stones may break my bones
The Children’s Chant, origin unknown; adopted as civic motto, Year One of the Accord
But words will never hurt me.
They took the bombs away first. Then the guns, then the knives, each in a different century, each removal celebrated as the final one. Last of all, and with the greatest solemnity, they took the fists. By the time Maren was born, the word violence had been reclassified in the Lexicon as a historical term, tagged with a small gray dagger. Children learned it the way they learned plague or trebuchet: with interest, with distance, with the mild superiority of the already-saved.
The Accord had held for five hundred and twelve years.
* * *
Maren worked in a Bureau of Linguistic Accountability sub-office, third floor, facing an interior courtyard where pigeons gathered on the lip of a dry fountain. The forms came in three categories: Defamatory, Coercive, and Diminishing.
“You look tired,” said Martin, from the adjacent desk.
“I am tired,” Maren said, agreement carrying no ambient load, no implication about the person who had noticed.
On her screen: a complaint filed by a woman named Doris against her neighbor Callum, who had told her that her garden was ambitious. Callum’s defense noted that he had always admired ambition.
She approved the complaint and moved to the next.
* * *
A philosopher whose work Maren had read in school (she could no longer remember the name, only the argument) had written that the Accord’s great achievement was not the elimination of the harmful act, but the elimination of the harmful impulse. People were kinder now. Genuinely, measurably, kinder.
Maren believed this. She also believed that the word ambitious had just cost Callum his professional reference for the next three years.
She believed both things the way she believed the fountain in the courtyard was decorative, obviously, without having to examine the pipes.
* * *
On her lunch break she sat near the fountain and ate an apple. She thought about a man whose name she had not said aloud in four years. He had told her, the last time she saw him, that she was the most careful person he had ever known.
The pigeons watched her eat. She did not speak to them. They were pigeons.
In the afternoon she processed a complaint from a child, eleven years old the intake form said, against his teacher, who had read aloud from an approved pre-Accord text, a passage in which one character told another she was brave.
The child’s complaint: that his teacher had not looked at him when she read it. That she had looked only at certain students.
The algorithm had not flagged it. It was not designed for negative space, for the absence of a look, the withholding of a glance.
Maren stared at the form. Outside, the fountain held its shape.
She approved the complaint. She marked it urgent. She did not know if she was right. She had stopped expecting to know.
Above the entrance of every Bureau building, engraved in gray granite: Words Will Never Hurt Me. She had always understood it as the second half of a promise, the first half already kept, already past.
She was beginning to suspect it was the other way around.
