Lexicon

Minnawara?’ and she said, ‘I like to jump. I will always jump.’ And she did; she jumped everywhere for the rest of her days, because she was too stubborn to give up the sling. Her feet grew long and tough, and she was the first kangaroo.”
    “That makes it worse,” Emily said. “Now it feels personal.” She looked at poor Minnawara.
    “But she’s a thief,” said Harry.
    • • •
    He didn’t talk. That is, he didn’t talk without a specific purpose. She found this unnerving. It made her wonder what he wasn’t saying. At first she probed him relentlessly, asking about politics, putting unlikely hypotheticals to him about their relationship over dinner. One night, just as he was drifting off, she said, “Who do you think is smarter, you or me?”
    She was a person who needed to know things. She didn’t want to guess what was in his head. She wanted to hear him say it. This was how she avoided surprises. One day she found an odd contraption in his shed, a tangle of frayed rope and petrified wood, and marched it to him where he was repairing a fence post, three hundred yards away. “What’s this?”
    He glanced at it. “Mobile.”
    “What does that mean?” She shook it. Dust fell. It looked about a million years old. Each section of petrified wood had a dark mark on it, and some of the marks looked strange.
    “It’s a mobile,” he said. “For babies.”
    She sat in the dirt. “You need to talk more. This, ‘it’s a mobile,’ isn’t enough for me. Understand?”
No
, she saw. “Why do you have a mobile? Where did it come from? What are these marks? What do you think about it?”
    He sat up.
    “I’m not used to people who don’t talk,” she said. “It’s honestly freaking me out.”
    He pulled her toward him, which she resisted, for a moment. His arms around her, the smell of his sweat spoiling her judgment, he said, “You think I need to say something to make it real.”
    “Yes. That’s exactly what I think.”
    He composed his thoughts, taking his time. “My father was a miner. Back when the mines were bigger. When he found something interesting down there, he brought it home. He made that mobile for me before I was born. I found it when I went through his stuff after he died. Decided to keep it in case I ever need it. I think it’s a good mobile.”
    “Okay,” she said. “Thank you, that’s all I needed, was that so hard?”
    He began to kiss her. Things deteriorated. But later she thought about what he’d said. About not needing to say something to make it real. This contradicted what she’d been taught. The brain used language to frame concepts: it employed words to identify and organize its own chemical soup. A person’s tongue even determined how they thought, to a degree, due to the subtle logical pathways that were created between concepts represented by similar-looking or -sounding words. So, yes, words did make things real, in at least one important way. But they were also just symbols. They were labels, not the things they labeled. You didn’t need words to feel. She decided he had a point. But it felt so strange.
    • • •
    He was a catch, of course. Women stopped her in the street to congratulate her. They cackled and wished her all the best. She was going down in Broken Hill folklore as the Girl Who Tamed Harry. There was a history, obviously. A procession of Girls Who Had Not Tamed Harry. But she didn’t ask about that. Not even when she ran into the real estate woman who had been with Harry before, the two approaching each other down a grocery store aisle like reluctant jousters. The whole time they were talking, the woman telling Emily about the benefits of freshly squeezed orange juice versus concentrate, Emily was thinking:
What happened?
Because this woman had been with Harry and now she wasn’t, so how had that happened, exactly? How did Harry handle a relationship breakup? Was he cruel? Deceitful? Indifferent? These were questions she wanted answered. But she didn’t ask them. She knew not to go snooping around for an ending unless she wanted one. She realized now that until she had come to Broken Hill, she had never been happy.

BNP BUILDS VOTER PROFILE DATABASE
    The British National Party has compiled personal details of tens of thousands of voters, it was revealed on Friday.
    The database, named Electrac, is used to personalize pamphlet, door-to-door, and telephone campaigns.
    Mark Mitchell, 38, claimed he worked for the BNP for eight