No Sign of L

A very short but quite challenging story about the preservation of letters and words and everything else we hold dear when it comes to communication. What would happend if someone took away our alphabet? Or even just one tiny little piece of it?

I did everything in my power to find it, but it’s just gone. I peeked under the bed, under my desk, behind the sofa, just everywhere. Between the books in my room and among the spoons and knives and forks in the cupboard. I even went through the garbage and I searched the attic and the space under the house. The shack in the garden. The garage. I’m pretty sure I exhausted every option, but it’s nowhere to be found.

I can see why this is no reason for anyone not knowing what’s at stake to get excited. Me, I am very excited. Frightened, that’s even more fitting. Petrified. I mean, I’m the one who was supposed to take care of it. I was the keeper, one might say. How I was appointed this task, I don’t know. As far as I can remember, dad was the keeper when I was a kid, and then without any kind of warning, I got appointed this task after his demise.

I’m no expert, as you have no doubt surmised, but I think it works this way with every keeper. From generation to generation, the keeper traditions and know-how are passed on, so that each and every servant of our cause has a successor.

Right, I guess it’s time to say something about the cause. Or, even more fitting, the mission. There are as many keepers as there are tongues and words and fonts and written forms. Each keeper gets assigned one item. He or she must protect and preserve the item at any cost. Often with extreme prejudice.

Yes, sometimes, it gets nasty.

It is surprising how many mad scientists and sinister bad guys there are in the universe, bent on dominating everything. It is even more surprising that what they want is not money or power. They want something tinier. Something that seems to be of no use. Of no big significance. But that is nothing more than a misconception.

They want to own the very means of our communication.

Imagine the keeper of R did not manage to keep it safe. Imagine not having any R’s to write, to say, or to otherwise use. How is a person supposed to express thoughts without an R?

See how giving away our R’s to some mad man’d be the end of everything?

And this is why I need to find that damned item of my keeping. Before some guy in a dark coat sporting a sinister moustache and maybe even a hat to go with the smirk on his face finds the item and destroys humanity.

But how am I to find it? I searched every nook and cranny. Every shadow, dark spot, narrow street, and bad neighborhood. It’s not on any riverbank and at no church or square or causeway or in the underground, on the tracks or on any station. I’m running out of ideas as to where to go and search for my artifact of humanity. This invention of man that I had in my keeping.

What to do now, I don’t know.

What I do know is that there is no sign of it.

No sign of…