APOSTROPHE’S DREAM

Yiyun Li

CHARACTERS

A small cluster of movable type, all of them punctuation marks, including:

COMMA, PERIOD, COLON, SEMICOLON, QUESTION MARK, EXCLAMATION MARK, ELLIPSIS, HYPHEN, EN DASH, EM DASH, PARENTHESIS (a pair, P1 and P2), QUOTATION MARKS (two pairs: Q1 and Q2 are double quotation marks; Q3 and Q4 are single quotation marks), APOSTROPHE, and a few others.

They all have the same square, antique, and smudged appearance. One has to look closely (and, for an inexperienced observer, to seek assistance with a mirror) to identify them correctly.

Their speaking voices vary but have the same dull metal timbre.

They have been friends all their lives, living in close quarters in a typesetter’s drawer. They have some acquaintances: letters in both upper case and lower case, but letters, though profoundly superficial, tend to act profoundly literate; and numbers, that most pompous band of brothers, who are good at inflating their values.

Punctuation marks are known for their acute sense of position, precision, and purpose, which is sometimes threatened by the world at large that is prone to imposition, imprecision, and purposelessness/fake purposefulness.