The Enthusiast

Rebecca Wadlinger
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Her favorite words were the ones that sounded dirty but were not. Masticate. Cul de sac. Angina. She used them often, delivering them with intense eye contact in hopes someone would catch on. No one ever did.
She liked to make words, too. She spent hours marking the covers of old books to fit her linguistic inclination—long ago, she’d scratched the “B” from Madame Bovary, added a “G” to the first syllable of Don Quixote.
Once an imitator scrawled an easy couple lines across The Joy Luck Club, but she pocketed that copy the moment she found it, repulsed by the cheap joke.
Sometimes it took days for her creations to disappear from the shelves, usually years. The books reappeared sheathed in new slipcovers, secrets tight beneath the plastic veneer.
But what did it matter? Thousands of books lined the library shelves. Her brain remained engorged with millions of dirty-but-not words. Cocktail. Kumquat. Pianist. Words that tickle the uvula. Words like a fire that she leaned in close to feed, the flames jumping at her touch.

Rebecca Wadlinger is a writer living in Portland, OR. Her translation of Norwegian Poet Gro Dahle’s A Hundred Thousand Hours is available from Ugly Duckling Presse. Rebecca earned an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin and a PhD from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.