AN ANAGRAM CURSE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a christening, slightly misspelled.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am the curate of Sodden Bottom, the lowest and wettest parish in all Sogmarsh — where the chapel bell rings underwater at high mire — and I will carry to my grave — which, in this damp, will not be deep — the three letters I put in the wrong order.

You must understand the conditions. A Sogmarsh christening is held in a chapel with a hole in the roof, in a draught that has its own name, by a man whose spectacles fog the instant he comes in from the rain. The font is half rainwater. The family crowds close for warmth, the baby bawls, the responses are mumbled, and somewhere in the rafters House Echo leans in to record the first lie told over the cradle — for there is always one, usually the godfather swearing he is solvent.

The child was to be named Mariel. A good plain name; her mother had chosen it off a faded sampler. And I had it, I swear I had it, right up until the moment I tipped the water and my spectacles went white and the draught took the page — and what came out of my mouth, in front of the Disinterested Lord and the godparents and the attentive walls, was three letters out of true.

Now. In most realms a slip of the tongue at a font is a slip of the tongue. But this is Sogmarsh, where names are not labels but bindings — say one wrong and you have not misspoken, you have re-spelled — and the poor mite was christened into a small, exact, lifelong affliction. To this day, whenever her name is spoken backwards — and children, being children, worked out within a week that it could be — she sneezes. Not ordinary sneezes. She sneezes perfectly formed, microscopic cubes of salt, a little drift of them, glittering, which the cat then knocks off the table.

I wept for a year. I had taken a clean new soul and put a typographical error in it.

And then the parish did the thing that, after a long life of christening the doomed, still undoes me.

They learned a new language.

Not all of it — a working amount. Enough that the child's name need never be said in the dangerous direction, even by accident. The whole sodden village sat down, that winter, and between them invented a small private tongue of nicknames and hand-signs and careful sideways phrasings, so that a girl could be called to her supper, scolded, sung to, and loved, her whole life through, without one stray salt-sneeze. They did it for her, who had done nothing, to mend a thing that I had broken. They were not clever people. They were better than that.

She is grown now, that girl, and famous up and down the fen for two things: the faint taste of the sea that hangs about her, and the fact that she is, by common agreement, the best-listened-to person in three parishes — because everyone, all her life, has had to try a little harder to say her properly, and people who are spoken to with care tend to grow up worth the care.

I still have the page, with my three crooked letters on it. I keep it as a penance, and a reminder.

A misspelled life can still be read perfectly well — by those who bother to try.