Wordfall

by Heather Pagano

There are delicious people in our online lives who offer incredible and impactful preciousness in spite of them living thousands of miles away. My friend and colleague, Heather Pagano, is such a person for me. I met Heather, who lives in California, in an Inked Voices accountability group many years ago, and we quickly became friends and sometimes critique partners. She was also one of my top choices for collaborators when I reached out to start the literary magazine Hotch Potch Literature and Art in 2022. If you like “Wordfall,” you’ll love her novella, The Declarer. She also writes about books, writing, and parenting on heather pagano.substack.com which was my own very first Substack subscription. Heather’s writing is engrossing, fanciful and detail-laden, and most importantly for this Substack, rich with relationships. “Wordfall” appeared in Hotch Potch Volume 2 Issue 1 and I’m thrilled and honored to reprint it here as Writers in Relationship’s first guest story.

***

When the first word drifted down from the sky, Tarina was sitting at an outdoor table, shamefaced, accepting the return of her denied credit card.

Her waiter, who was busy explaining the card’s failure in his broken English, did not see the bold black word floating down, like a lost feather, right above his head.

Tarina saw it.

The word skidded over his shoulder, down his sleeve, and came to rest on his hairy hand, just below his rolled cuff. The letters were about half an inch tall. They spelled could. 

The waiter followed Tarina’s gaze and stared at the word on his hand. He attempted to brush the word away, like a fly, but the letters were stuck to him. He sucked in a shaky breath of surprise.

Tarina was quite startled herself. She held her breath with him for a beat.

Then two.

Three.

She soon had to give up the contest because the waiter never exhaled. He was no longer breathing at all. He did not speak, did not twitch, did not blink. He simply stood there, his face frozen in the transitional expression between displeasure over the declined card, and shock at finding a word stuck to his hand.

Tarina looked up at the smudged gray sky from which big black words were falling like rain. Words lodged in balcony rails and on flower boxes, slid down striped storefront canopies. When they landed on the cobblestone street, each one evaporated in a puff of black mist.

A second word landed on the waiter and stuck right to the tip of his nose. It read over.

Tarina's jet-lagged, hormone-addled pregnancy brain wondered why, at a pizzeria in Ivrea, it was raining words in English instead of in Italian. 

Tarina was not the only one to notice the falling words. At a table in front of a nearby café, a frightened man and woman pointed to Tarina’s waiter, gone stiff as a statue, then at the falling words. The couple abandoned their coffees and bolted from the table. They tripped over bistro chairs as they ran for the cover of the café awning. They screamed in Italian, a language Tarina couldn’t understand, but she understood their fear.

The fleeing man froze, suddenly, in mid-stride. His companion screamed again. She pulled his hand. Once, twice. She looked up to the sky, saw her fate falling from above, and ran, leaving her frozen companion behind.

An ache spread through Tarina’s chest seeing the woman abandon him. Were the man and woman coworkers? Lovers? Friends? Perhaps they hadn’t figured out what they meant to each other. She and Jonathan never had.

Tarina looked up through tear-blurred eyes to see that more words had fallen on her waiter, peppering his hair, his eyes, his shoulders.

It suddenly occurred to Tarina that she should seek shelter from the wordfall. But where? 

People feared the falling words. The shouts of panicked customers echoed up and down the narrow cobblestone street. So did the slams of shop owners locking the metal security doors that defended their storefronts. Both the pizzeria and the café had already locked their doors. A knot of pedestrians huddled beneath the only nearby shelter, a striped canvas awning. 

Tarina decided to join them.

She jumped up from the table, heedless of the first trimester head rush that made her dizzy unless she stood slowly. She shook off her ringing ears and bolted toward the awning. 

As she ran, she dodged the wordfall that drifted down all around her. A phrase came back to her, something Jonathan had told her on the way to their first big venture funding meeting, back when they were two hopeful co-founders caught in the rain with no umbrella, and Tarina had dreaded asking millionaires for money while looking like a drowned rat.

Don’t worry, Jonathan had told her. We’ll run between the raindrops.

Now Tarina had to run between words.

When she reached the café awning, it no longer seemed so safe. People elbowed each other and spoke in loud, tense voices. Tarina wished she knew what they were saying.

A woman wearing a form-fitting, gray dress and a bright pink blazer grabbed Tarina’s arm. There was a tiny brown-and-white dog ensconced in her big pink purse. She asked Tarina a question in Italian.

Tarina opened her mouth to explain that she couldn’t understand, but when she tried to speak, not a single sound emerged from her throat. It was as if her voice had become a vacuum. She could not talk.

The woman in the pink jacket stared at Tarina, expectant.

Tarina covered her ears and tried again to speak, but there was no sound. The sensation of vibrating vocal cords was absent, so was the pressure in her ears, the slight echo in her sinuses.

Did the falling words strike people mute? No. Everyone else there was shouting. 

Was her silence some strange effect of the pregnancy, hormones and the wordfall combining to make her lose her voice? If that was true, then she’d get her voice back in just four hours, when she was scheduled to end the life of the baby she and Jonathan had mistakenly made together.

The little dog in the purse growled. His owner in the pink blazer slapped a hand over her mouth. Tarina followed her gaze.

The waiter who stood frozen at Tarina’s table was now completely covered in black words. He bristled with them, as if he were an enormous magnet covered with iron filings. His features, his clothes, were no longer visible. 

The same thing had happened to the man who’d been abandoned by his companion. It seemed that once a person was frozen in place by the wordfall, they became an attractor, a word magnet. 

The woman in the pink blazer gave Tarina’s arm a little squeeze. “You speak English?” 

Since she couldn’t talk, Tarina nodded.

“Have you seen,” the woman said in accented, but very good English, “that the falling words are English words?”

Tarina nodded again.

“Can you read if they are saying something?” the woman asked.

Tarina shook her head.

The little dog in the purse sniffed Tarina’s neck.

“You’re American,” the woman said, “you know how to figure things out. What should we do?”

Only when she traveled abroad did anyone guess Tarina was American. Back home in Palo Alto, Tarina had always stood out, having inherited a trace of her Bulgarian mother’s accent, high cheekbones, and her pointed nose.

 “I am an expert internet researcher,” the woman said. “I teach online research to middle school students. English websites are superior to Italian ones. I’m certain you read English faster than me, so together we will look up on the internet what to do to stop these words from raining.”

Before Tarina could agree or refuse, a tightness squeezed the air, an atmospheric shift that communicated something was coming. Tarina guessed that it would probably not be good.

Behind them, someone screamed.

Tarina turned in time to see the word-smothered waiter explode into a million black shards.

Tarina grabbed the woman in the pink blazer and pulled her to the ground. There was no time to think, no time to question the instinct to protect. 

As she and the woman toppled onto the café welcome mat, Tarina grabbed her purse so the little dog wouldn’t be crushed in the fall. Jonathan had ingrained the love of dogs too deeply in Tarina for her to allow harm to come to any canine.

Tarina wrapped herself around the woman as the sound of more explosions thundered through the narrow cobblestone street. Shrapnel peppered the back of Tarina’s leather jacket and bit into her scalp. Each word that touched her skin stung to the roots of her teeth, and then they vanished, leaving no trace they’d ever been there.

Tarina prepared for each moment to be her last before she, like the waiter and the abandoned man, turned into a wordfall statue. She thought of her father, then of Jonathan. Jonathan had never wanted to be more than Tarina’s business partner, but she had wanted them to be so much more.

Then Tarina realized that if she got frozen by the wordfall, she’d pin the woman she was trying to rescue to the ground. She hurried to roll off the woman, and was surprised when she could still move. Tarina had not turned into a statue. As the seconds passed, she could still bend her knees, move her arms.

She stood and brushed the words left and behind from her stretchy pants. The words tumbled to the ground and disappeared.

Why hadn’t she been frozen?

A glance around showed that others hadn’t been so lucky. Everyone in the radius of the waiter’s explosion was covered with black words, and all of them had gone stiff as stone. Some had frozen in the act of fleeing. Others lay staring up at the café awning that had offered little protection after all. The cafe window had shattered during the explosion, and the people inside, who had believed themselves safe, were now frozen in attitudes of passive horror, onlookers who had become part of the terror in one unexpected instant.

The statue of the abandoned man had disintegrated.

The little dog in the bright pink purse licked Tarina’s hand. There were letters in its fur. It shook itself, dislodging the words new, lie, and sea. The words vanished the moment they touched the ground.

Then the woman in the pink blazer sat up. She collected her purse and patted the little dog, examined the broken glass on the ground. She studied the words tattooed across the faces of the people who stood frozen all around them.

She looked at the word she, which still hung from the fluff of her little dog’s ear. “You and Biscotti both got hit with the words,” the woman said, “but neither of you turned to stone.”

Still mute, Tarina could only nod.

“Every human who got hit with words turned to statues, but you did not. You are different.”

Different. The accusation landed in Tarina’s gut. She’d grown up different. A mother who was foreign, a father who had once been tech elite, then lost everything and shot himself. Tarina had spent high school as an outsider, too poor to belong to the community where her mother had sacrificed everything to remain for Tarina’s education. Being the only one who was different did not make people like you.

Tarina could have explained that she was pregnant, and perhaps that was why she had a different reaction to the wordfall. But lacking a voice, and the fact that her pregnancy didn’t yet show, it was too hard to communicate her guess.

The woman in the pink blazer took a tiny piece of cheese from her pocket and fed it to the dog, who nibbled it eagerly. “You can’t talk, can you?”

Tarina shook her head.

“You speak English, the falling words are in English. You get hit by words, you do not get frozen. You can’t talk. I think you’re involved in making these words rain from the sky. Are you?”

Tarina shrugged, miserable. She knew nothing more than the Italian woman, but her conclusion resonated with a shuddering guilt that had nothing to do with the appointment at the private abortion clinic Tarina been waiting to attend.

Could Tarina be somehow to blame for the wordfall?

“Maybe you are making this happen,” the woman said. “If you are, this is good—that means you have the power to make it stop.”

Tarina wasn’t so sure.

“Whatever is happening, you don’t mean to do it. You saved me and Biscotti. You are a good person.”

Tarina was not good—she only wanted to be.

“We will stop these words from coming down.” The woman pulled a short, thick wad of candy-striped nylon from her purse. She undid a snap and fiddled with the handle. It opened up into an absolutely enormous, pink-and-white-striped umbrella.

“First,” the woman said, “I must go home to my aunt before she goes outside for her afternoon walk and gets hit by a word.”

Tarina mimed a phone at her ear.

“Zia won’t use the phone; I must go to her. Once we reach my home and she is safe, we will use the computer, and we will research a way to make the falling words stop.”

* * * 

Huddled under the enormous, pink-and-white umbrella, Tarina and the Italian woman hurried through the back streets of Ivrea in order to reach her elderly aunt before she stepped outside into the perilous wordfall. The two of them clung to the umbrella handle, so close that Tarina could smell the woman’s sour sweat mixed with the ghost of her faded perfume. The little dog, Biscotti, was squeezed between them in the big pink purse. His long, soft fur tickled the back of Tarina’s arm. 

 They were running down a path between an alley wall and a canal. The canal, which stank of algae and stagnant sludge, was clogged with ragged trees growing out of its shallow water, and was spanned by a triple-arched bridge. Huge words slid down that bridge and dripped down distant towers on the opposite shore. Smaller words sprinkled around them, pelting their umbrella and the alley wall. Big or small, each word that fell evaporated the moment it landed on the ground.

A distant bell tower tolled.

The woman dug fingertips into her side, then slowed and stopped. “It is only 1:00,” she said. “My neighborhood is just through that gate, and we will reach my aunt well before her daily walk at 1:30.” She winced. “I have such a cramp in my side. Stop for a moment so I can breathe.”

Tarina held the umbrella with both hands while the woman tried to massage away her runner’s cramp. Biscotti scratched the inside of the purse and whined. Standing still made Tarina uneasy. She pulled out her phone and checked the time.

“Oh!” the woman stared at the phone as if it were a miracle. “Why didn’t I think of this sooner! We can use the phone to communicate. You can’t talk, but you can type. Let’s start with this: My name is Giulia Tellone. What is your name?”

Tarina launched her note-taking app and typed her name. Giulia leaned close to the phone and peered at the little letters. She held out a finger as if that would help focus her eyes. When she did, the tip of her finger brushed Tarina’s name. Before she could stop it, Tarina’s very expensive, very new smartphone interpreted the touch as a tap, and it launched Tarina’s Wikipedia entry. Giulia’s eyes widened when she discovered Tarina’s identity. She snatched the phone from Tarina and scrolled through the article.

“You are one of the two co-founders of Generation Story? You are famous! Even here in Italy, we know of your company. We were all waiting for the native Italian version of the app to come out. Then–poof!–you shut down Generation Story before we got our dream. How my aunt would have loved to receive a letter from one of her ancestors directly in our language.”

Generation Story, Tarina’s life’s work, the great success her mother had always hoped Tarina would make of her life. A redemption for her father’s failure. The app had meant everything to Tarina. To Jonathan, not so much.

Jonathan had loved scrambling the breathless climb to success with Tarina, but once their app made big time, he’d wanted to bail–sell their company for big bucks or, when Tarina refused that, to hire outside talent to do the coding. Tarina wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of her life intimately involved with Jonathan and Generation Story. He’d wanted to be rid of the app and his tie to Tarina. 

Jonathan would have wanted to be rid of their baby, too, if he’d lived long enough for Tarina to discover she was pregnant. She and Jonathan had made a baby together the night before his engagement party--a party to celebrate his engagement to another woman. Their night together had been a huge mistake, and had Jonathan lived, Tarina’s pregnancy would have been a huge problem.

“Why did you close down such a successful app all of the sudden?” Giulia asked. “Does this Wikipedia entry explain it?”

Tarina had shut down Generation Story overnight, practically going bankrupt to refund unfulfilled subscriptions, services promised and never rendered, corporate partners whose contracts demanded penalty fees.

As Giulia scrolled, another picture appeared. It was from the big interview Tarina and Jonathan had done two years ago with Forbes. The photo was subtitled Generation Story Co-founders. It showed Tarina and Jonathan at a Palo Alto park, Jonathan’s arm snugged around Tarina’s shoulders. Together, they smiled down at Byte, Jonathan’s rescued pit bull, who gazed up at his master with utter adoration.

Byte had survived the car crash that had killed Jonathan. It would have been far kinder for Byte to have died with his beloved Jonathan. Tarina wished she could have died that day, too.

“Your co-founder is dead,” Giulia said. “So you could not run the app without him?”

Tarina stared down at her shoes.

Giulia read from the phone “Founder Tarina’s combined skills in software and story-telling formed a unique synergy with Jonathan’s expertise in databases and history. Together they developed an app that took input—sometimes quite vague input—about the life of a long-ago ancestor, and used it to generate correspondence addressed to their descendants. The results were a raving hit with their clients.” 

Tarina couldn’t bear to think about Jonathan and Generation Story any longer. The Wikipedia article made their collaboration seem like a fairytale, and it had started that way, until Jonathan wanted to be rid of Generation Story and of her. Before she’d made that one, misguided attempt to lure him into acknowledging they were something more than co-founders. A night in bed that had sent Jonathan driving too fast back to his real fiancée, and left Tarina pregnant with a baby Jonathan would have never wanted.

Tarina took back her phone and pointed to the time—1:07 pm. 

Giulia led Tarina through the faded red door in the old stone wall. It opened on a street of apartments stacked atop little offices. There were hardly any people on the street. 

Giulia hurried Tarina past a medical office. When Tarina recognized it, her breath hitched. It was the clinic where she had an appointment to end her pregnancy, just as she was sure Jonathan would have wanted. That appointment was at 4:30. Just a little over three hours from now.

Giulia saw Tarina’s distress, but misinterpreted its motivation. “Don’t worry,” Giulia said. “We’re almost to my home. We’ll get Zia safe, then research online. You are the genius behind Generation Story. If anyone can solve a problem of words—“

Giulia slammed into Tarina and screamed.

Biscotti growled.

A boy stood in the middle of the street. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, wearing jeans that hung in fashionable threads at the knees. Words jutted from his thick, wiry hair. He had big eyes with dark circles under them, and long, curling lashes. His mouth hung open as if in shock. 

“Giaccomo!” 

Giulia nearly bolted from underneath the umbrella to reach the boy, but Tarina ran after her, keeping her sheltered from the wordfall. When they reached the boy, Giulia’s trembling hand extended to caress his curls. Tarina yanked that hand back. If Giulia’s finger grazed one of the words clinging to the boy, she would be turned to stone. 

Giulia wrapped her arms around herself, as if for comfort. “We must carry Giaccomo out of the falling words before they gather on him and he explodes.”

Tarina nodded. She and Giulia used both hands and pushed, but they couldn’t budge the boy. It was as though he’d been cemented to the ground. 

“We must help him.” Mascara-dyed tears ran down Giulia’s face. “I’m his teacher. He is the most bright, beautiful boy. This cannot happen to him.”

Biscotti whined. Tarina angled the huge, pink-and-white umbrella so that it covered the three of them. Protecting him from further wordfall was the only thing she could think to do. 

Giulia pulled out her phone to look at the time. 1:15. “Oh my god,” she said. “If I don’t stay here with the umbrella, Giaccomo gets covered with words and blows up. If I don’t go home, my half-blind aunt walks out the door and meets the same fate. What do I do?”

Tarina didn’t know. The sick feeling that she was somehow to blame for all this blended with the hormonal haze of grief and guilt she already lived in.

“I’ve been keeping Zia alive for more than a decade on nothing but love.” The note of hopefulness was gone from Giulia’s voice. “I can’t lose Zia like this. But, Giaccomo, he is so young. His whole life—“

If this was all Tarina’s fault, if she really was to blame—if she really was the master of words the Wikipedia article made her out to be—if technology could help get them out of this. Tarina had nothing but a gut instinct to indicate that it might.

A word drifted over the end of the umbrella and floated slowly toward the ground. It read: try. It brushed to the pavement, then vanished.

Tarina pulled out her phone and typed. Tell me about the boy.

Giulia squinted at the flashing words. “Why?”

Because we have to try something. 

Tarina set the phone to record text-to-speech. Giulia told what she knew of Giaccomo in careful English. When she was done, Tarina scanned the text, corrected some misinterpretations, then selected and copied it.

“What are you doing?” Giulia asked.

Tarina opened an app that existed only on her phone. It could ping the only instance of Generation Story that still worked, maintained on a server that she paid a thousand dollars a month to keep active. She pasted in the story Giulia had recited about Giaccomo, linked to two of the boy’s public social media accounts, then hit the compile button.

A quill graphic spun. Even with Tarina’s uber phone, she was still connecting to a private server half a world away. It was 1:25. Time to save the elderly aunt was growing short.

The spinning quill stopped, and a large text field took its place. Generation Story had done its job, compiling Giulia’s words and the social media feeds into a coherent life story, as if Giaccomo were writing the story of his life.

 Tarina jabbed her finger at the screen.

“You want me to read it?” Giulia asked.

Tarina shook her head. She pointed to the screen, then to Giaccomo.

“Read it aloud to him? He only understands Italian.“

Tarina rolled her finger. Translate.

Giulia read aloud in Italian. Tarina read over her shoulder in English.

My name is Giaccomo. I’m fourteen years old. As a kid I played in the grocery store where my mother and father worked. Customers came to see me, and I liked being silly and making everyone laugh, and my mother never minded.

Then she got a sickness in her bones, and she started minding. Nothing I said or did could even make her smile. She was always frustrated with me. 

When she died, it was like my voice died with her. I hid in the back room of the grocery store, I wouldn’t come out to help, even if my father asked. At school I barely spoke.

Then I met Miss Tellone in the school library. She paid attention to what I was curious about, and helped me discover websites to learn even more. I found other kids at the library who shared my interests and helped me develop new ones. Talking with them brought back my voice. For the first time since my mamma died, I dared to be funny again, and my friends weren’t frustrated with my jokes; they liked that I was funny.

Giulia grabbed Tarina’s elbow, and Tarina looked up from the phone to see smeary words melting down Giaccomo’s face. He trembled. Crumpled to his knees. Giulia knelt beside him. She wrapped her arms around the boy and rocked him, crying and whispering in unintelligible Italian. Giaccomo lifted his face from Guila’s shoulder and looked up at Tarina through his long-lashed eyes.

For the first time ever, Generation Story had been used to tell the story of a living person. Generation Story had filled in quite a lot that Giulia hadn’t told it--especially the part about his mother not laughing anymore when she’d grown ill.

If Generation Story could save Giaccomo by helping him tell his story, could Tarina use the same method to save others across Ivrea who had been frozen?

* * * 

Tarina skidded to a stop beside Giulia. They’d reached a glossy brown door framed in the side of a lichen-covered, old, stone wall, which must be Giulia’s home. Giulia plunged a hand into her purse and brought out keys, ignoring Biscotti’s nips and licks.

They’d taken precious time to walk Giaccomo back to his apartment—Giulia had refused to leave her student anywhere she did not consider safe—but now it was already 1:30, and Giulia was afraid for her aunt.

Words tap-tapped atop their pink-and-white umbrella.

“Zia,” Giulia said, fumbling with the keys, “I have kept her alive for so many years. Everyone said I was crazy, throwing my life away for the love of an old woman.” The keys in the lock rattled and clunked. “If Zia is frozen, even if you could bring her back, I don’t know if her heart could take it. I cannot lose her.”

The brown door swung open. Biscotti’s bark sharpened.

They squeezed into a stone courtyard that enclosed a large patio behind a house of cracked yellow stucco. A stone stairwell descended from its second-story balcony down to the ground. Following the angle of the stairs, a laundry line stretched from the balcony to a pole in the courtyard. Large, white sheets and tablecloths flapped in the rising wind. 

Words tumbled from the sky and slid down the linens, where they dripped to the ground and disappeared. The elderly aunt was nowhere in sight.

“Oh Maria Santa, Zia has not yet come out for the laundry.” Giulia hefted the purse with Biscotti in it farther up her shoulder. “Perhaps she did notice the words raining, after all. Listen, we must research online out how we can rescue the other—“

An elderly woman stepped out onto the balcony and called Giulia’s name. Giulia shouted back something in Italian, her gesticulations indicating that the her aunt must return inside. Instead, Zia tottered down the stairs. 

Tarina and Giulia exchanged a wordless glance. Tarina grabbed Biscotti from Giulia and made a shoving gesture. Take the umbrella and go. 

Giulia hesitated for a moment, perhaps still worried about leaving Tarina and Biscotti unprotected from the wordfall, though both Tarina and the little dog had proved immune to its effects.

“Go!” Tarina mouthed the word.

Giulia bounded forward.

For one stunned moment, Tarina watched Giulia and the umbrella dash across the courtyard. Giulia’s high heels tap-tapped across the cobblestone. Her bright pink jacket glowed against the gray sky, the gray cobbles, and the faded terra cotta planters full of white geraniums.

Words fell all around. One stung the side of Tarina’s unprotected face. She never saw it, but felt its meaning. Failed.

Another word pelted her neck. This one caused  a dull ache, like brain freeze, and its meaning was more vague: not, or perhaps, didn’t or couldn’t, or perhaps, wouldn’t.

Giulia had almost reached her aunt. Then the pink spike of her high-heeled shoe caught in the uneven cobblestone pavement.

She screamed.

Tripped.

A gust of wind snatched the umbrella from her hands. The wind sent the umbrella skittering across the courtyard.

When the old woman, Zia, saw Giulia fall, she clapped her hands to her mouth, as if to stifle a scream, but the scream never came. In the moment she’d been watching Giulia trip and fall, Zia had been struck by the wordfall. A bold-faced word adhered to the old woman’s forehead, right between her brows.

Tarina ran to Giulia. She, too, had been hit. Giulia lay on her belly, her head turned to one side. Across her left cheek was the word stayed. Tarina grabbed Giulia’s arm—still warm—and shook her. In the big pink purse, Biscotti trembled. A second word floated down and landed on the glassy surface of Giulia’s eye. But.

Tarina swallowed a silent sob. Perhaps it was only pregnancy hormones, but though she’d only known Giulia a short time, she cared for the woman deeply. The reality was gouged in her heart. If she didn’t bring Giulia back to life before the wordfall covered her as it had the waiter and the abandoned man, Giulia would be blown to smithereens. Obliterated. Gone. And it would be all Tarina’s fault.

Another gust of wind grabbed at Giulia’s fallen umbrella. With a harsh, scraping sound, the wind dragged the umbrella across the courtyard.  Then, rising on an eddy of dried leaves and falling words, the umbrella was blown over the fence into a neighboring yard.

* * * 

Biscotti trotted in from the balcony, where he’d been checking on his mistresses, and jumped up on the worn leather sofa beside Tarina. Tarina ruffled his wind-blown fur and closed the lid on the box of old photographs in her lap. The little dog licked the back of her hand. He was probably hungry, but there was no time to search out his food because Giulia and her aunt were in danger of blowing up at any minute.

After they’d been frozen, both women were cemented to the ground. Just as it had been with Giaccomo, it was impossible to move them inside to safety. To protect Giulia and Zia from being covered over in words, Tarina had rigged bed sheets and tablecloths across the laundry line, then weighted the linens with heavy stone planters. 

The impromptu tent was a temporary shelter at best. Rising wind made the hems of the linens flap. Falling words, which were attracted to the wordfall victims like iron filings to a magnet, were driven by the wind beneath that hem. If the sheets weren’t ripped away by the wind, the words sneaking through beneath the tent would find the two women and they’d explode. 

Tarina stood, and Biscotti hopped down and stared up at her, expectant. She sighed and replaced the box of old photos on the bookshelf.

Tarina had come inside Giulia’s house to scour the place for any details she could use to create a Generation Story that would bring Giulia back to life. Gathering details had been Jonathan’s expertise--not Tarina’s--but Jonathan was gone, so Tarina searched.

Giulia’s full name had been easy to find on bills on the hallway table. The name gave access to Giulia’s social media feeds. Tarina learned Giulia’s age, the names and occupations of her friends. She knew the school where Giulia worked as an online research facilitator in a middle school library.

Social feeds showed that Giulia’s students adored her. The feeds also depicted Giulia on vacations, Giulia with a boyfriend–though he’d disappeared from her streams over the last year. 

Sometimes Giulia posted photos of her elderly aunt. Zia’s pics were artistic, showing the beauty in the aged face, depicting grace in everyday acts of buying bread, ironing, gardening. 

Zia was the only family Giuila ever mentioned. The question of Giulia’s parents was answered by an obituary in the box of photos Tarina had just replaced on the bookshelf. Giulia’s parents had died in a car crash when she’d been eleven. When Tarina’s father had shot himself, she’d been twelve. Nearly the same age.

Could Generation Story stitch these tidbits of information together to write a story for Giulia that would bring her back?

Biscotti barked and nipped at the hem of Tarina’s stretchy pants. Tarina followed the little dog to the balcony. There she saw that one of the tablecloth corners she’d weighted down with a geranium planter had been blown loose. The tablecloth flapped in the wind, allowing words to blow inside the makeshift shelter.

Tarina bolted down the steps that led from the balcony to the patio below to fix the tent. As she ran, a word smacked her throat, sending hot ripples of shame through her. Unwanted. 

She ignored the word and rushed to repair the laundry line tent. Tarina rolled the planter back to weigh down the sheet. As she worked, words stung, tore, pinched, and scratched her.

Beneath the linens, the two women were accumulating a fine fuzz of words, but they were not yet blackened over completely. Tarina could still save them. It was time to let Generation Story work its magic.

Tarina ducked under the tent and pulled out her phone. She entered Giulia Tellone into Generation Story’s content creation panel, and typed in what she’d learned.

Giulia, a little girl, certainly loved by the mother and father whose only trace remained in the box of old photos. A teen who, after losing those loving parents, must have been raised by her aunt. A young woman who’d returned Zia’s love with care and kindness, staying near her aunt always, attending a nearby university where she’d graduated with a degree in teaching English. 

Yet Giulia hadn’t become an English teacher. Instead she worked at a neighborhood school coaching online research skills. It was a unique position to become a mentor to students. Giulia loved those students, and they returned her affection. 

Giulia’s life was a work of love, caring for her elderly aunt no matter what, feeling a devotion and sense of friendship to her students that went far beyond her job description.

Giulia was not like Tarina, luring a man to make love to her the night before his engagement to another woman. She was a good person, and Tarina did her best to explain that Generation Story.

Tarina uploaded these details and Giulia’s social media links, and let the app compile the rest into a story that would, hopefully, bring Giulia back to life.

* * * 

Defeated, Tarina squatted underneath the makeshift tent that sheltered Giulia and Zia. 

Why hadn’t Generation Story revived Giulia? Tarina didn’t know.

Outside the tent the wind blew stronger, rippling and snapping the weighted linens that hung like sails over the laundry line. The inside of the tent glowed blue with the light of Tarina’s phone, which backlit every word that dropped from the sky and slid down the sides of the bedsheets. Tarina read the words backwards as they slipped down the outside of the tent: always, never, forget. 

Beneath the sheets Giulia and Zia were still as statues. Stray words blew  under the sheltering linens and clung to Giulia’s tights and pink heels. A few had scattered over her pink jacket. The word refused stood out in bold type on her cheek. 

Biscotti darted back and forth between his two mistresses. Then the little dog sat and scratched an ear with his hind leg. He gave Tarina a quizzical look, as if asking the same question that had been torturing Tarina. Why hadn’t the process that revived Giaccomo brought Giulia back to life? 

Certainly the input Tarina had fed Generation Story was incomplete at best--unlike with Giaccomo, she’d had no one to interview who knew Giluia’s personal history. Then there was the fact that, having no voice, Tarina had employed a computerized, text-to-speech program to narrate the generated story. Perhaps with Giaccomo’s rescue the true magic hadn’t happened until Giulia had translated the Generation Story text into Italian.

The wind rose. The sheets flapped. With a crack, another heavy stone planter tipped and shattered. The sheet it had anchored flew up. Roots, leaves, and dirt scattered everywhere. Biscotti pushed his way into Giulia’s bright pink purse and disappeared inside.

Tarina sprang up to repair the rupture in the tent. If Giulia and her aunt were unshielded, the wordfall would cover them quickly, and there would be no time to figure out how to bring Giulia back before it was too late.

Outside the tent words rained all around Tarina. She dragged another planter on top of the sheets. Words slapped and stung her. While she worked, the wind ripped the loose sheet from the laundry line. It flew up and away over the stone courtyard fence, following the lost umbrella. 

Tarina threw herself over Giulia to shield her from the wordfall that the wind drove into their ruined tent. Biscotti’s snout emerged from the big, pink purse for just a moment, then disappeared.

Tarina decided there was no choice but to reengineer the shelter. She anchored a tablecloth over Zia, threw another sheet over Giulia, and sat out in the wordfall, using her own body weight to hold the linens in place.

Words hailed all around her, driving down, pelting, rocketing needles. Every word that fell was the same. 

Jonathan. Jonathan. Jonathan. Jonathan. Jonathan.

It was agony. Tarina tried to bellow, but her throat was a vacuum, her voice vanished. Wind whipped her hair and tore at the sheets that were the last, fragile protection for Giulia and her aunt.

What did it mean, Jonathan’s name, barreling down from the sky, attacking her like a swarm of bees? Where had all the other words gone, that only his name remained?

Tarina dove under the sheet and lay on her belly in the shelter next to Giulia. She’d avoided lying on her belly ever since learning she was pregnant. Tarina knew nothing about caring for herself and the baby during the first trimester because she’d refused to learn. Jonathan had already been dead when she’d found out she was pregnant, so from the moment she’d known their baby existed, Tarina had planned to end its life as soon as she ended Generation Story. Jonathan had wanted to be rid of the company, of Tarina, and he’d have wanted to be rid of the baby, too.

Jonathan. His name was stuck in Giulia’s hair, above her brow, and many copies of it were scattered across the back of her pink blazer. Biscotti nudged his muzzle from the purse. Even he had Jonathan’s name tangled in the fur beneath his chin.

Tarina opened her Generation Story app and entered Jonathan’s name into the content creation panel. She connected to the Wikipedia article Giulia had read about the founding of Generation Story and to Jonathan’s obituary. She connected to Jonathan’s public social media profiles. She entered his birth date and the day he’d died. She wrote down his important childhood info. She even connected to Jonathan’s old coding logs and the work calendar they’d once shared. Tarina had preserved both on the same server that housed the last vestiges of Generation Story.

When she could think of no more information to provide, she hit the compile button.

The quill graphic spun. 

And spun.

And spun.

Tarina had just given Generation Story a huge amount of information to digest. She waited, terrified that the connection would be lost, or the server would return an error, or that Generation Story would not be able to make anything coherent from the journal entry.

Inside the pink purse, Biscotti scratched an ear with his hind foot. Tarina saw through bleary eyes that her phone battery was running low. Her charger was all the way back in her hotel room, two miles, maybe more, away.

The spinning quill finally stopped, and a scrolling text field took its place. Every muscle along Tarina’s throat tightened. A strangling feeling. 

My name is Jonathan, and I’m 32 years old. I founded Generation Story with my best friend, Tarina. The app was a way bigger success than I ever imagined. I was totally floored by how big our company grew, but Tarina wasn’t surprised at all. It was like everything was going according to her plan. I was kind of in awe of her.

I thought Tarina and I would do what everybody in Silicon Valley does, ride the fame, then sell off Generation Story and take a break for a while. Have a life, maybe take time off together to start a family, then while our kid was playing at preschool, Tarina and I would put our heads together and come up with the next really, really big thing.

Tarina didn’t see it that way. She wouldn’t let go of Generation Story. She refused to sell, refused to take in partners. She wouldn’t even let us hire coders to help me maintain the database and get the releases out on time. 

It’s so embarrassing how long it took me to figure out that Tarina didn’t care about me the way I cared about her. 

We were business partners, and when it came to business, she was all business. I tried not to take it personally. I think it was something about her dad, how his big startup flopped before he shot himself, and she was going to make sure she rode our success all the way to the bitter top.

When I did figure out Tarina didn’t want a personal partnership, I tried to move on. I should have quit Generation Story, but I couldn’t let go of the part of Tarina and me that was working.

I messed everything up. I got engaged to this amazing woman while I was still all tangled up with Tarina. Then I really screwed up. I slept with Tarina. 

To make things worse, I convinced myself that the infidelity didn’t matter just so long as I wasn’t late to the engagement party. Totally stupid, I know. I was toast after not sleeping for like a week getting the G7 release out on time.

About the only thing I can say is at least I didn’t chain my fiancée down to a man who didn’t deserve her, and I see from my obituary that Byte didn’t get killed in the car crash.

As long as Byte is living with Tarina, now, and Tarina is still taking care of Generation Story and using it to make thousands of people feel more connected to where they came from and who they are, then I guess my life wasn’t a total loss.

Trapped under the bedsheet, Tarina couldn’t breathe. She struggled out into the open air, where words still rained down from the sky. She tipped her head back and let the burning, stinging, slapping, poking, tickling words fall on her upturned face. 

She reached up for the words and yanked any she could reach from the sky, one after the next. She held them in her palm, feathery, jittering, sometimes sizzling, sometimes freezing. Then she found a few that seemed to click together, like puzzle pieces. She rolled up her sleeve and pressed them into her skin, where they stuck.

The work took on a kind of momentum. Words fell faster, harder, leaving little time to make decisions.  Some word combinations made no meaning, so she dumped them and let them dissolve. Others seemed to fit into a pattern. Tarina caught, discarded, kept, reordered the falling words. Then she did it all again. 

It was as if she had become her own algorithm, her own Generation Story engine. The wordfall was Jonathan’s database feed, pulling in all the information it could find and raining it down. Tarina was the storytelling algorithm, sorting what she needed out of the air, discarding the rest.

Staged. Watching another child and his father walk into the house she and her mother had been forced to stage and sell after her father shot himself in the upstairs office.

Acquisition. Jonathan begging Tarina to accept a lucrative buyout offer so they could cash out of Generation Story and take a break. Tarina’s refusal because Generation Story was about so much more than a buyout offer. The more Jonathan pushed to sell, the harder Tarina pushed back. She hated that he didn’t want to do her life’s work with her, anymore, that the spark between the two of them meant nothing to him.

Guilt. A sick feeling of wrongness that had clung to her and twisted everything since the day her mom had found her father dead. Tarina feared her dad had shot himself because he was afraid of disappointing her, of not being able to give her everything she asked for. 

Now she felt guilty for pulling Jonathan to her on the day before he’d died, when his defenses were low, and hers. She’d desperately wanted him to reconsider the engagement and to admit that they meant more to each other than just being co-founders.

She’d been wrong about Jonathan—he hadn’t wanted to sell Generation Story because he’d wanted to be rid of her. He’d wanted to sell Generation Story so they could be more to each other than business partners.

What else had she been wrong about? Her father’s reason for shooting himself? Her mother’s disappointment if she didn’t follow a tech career? And what other mistakes was Tarina about to make because she didn’t understand her own life story?

The sheet beside her stirred. Biscotti. 

Tarina thought of Byte, and how she’d just let Jonathan’s fiancée make arrangements for him, never once asking if she could keep the dog who’d been part of her daily life for the last four years–all because she couldn’t understand what was important to Jonathan until she’d understood what was important to her.

Tarina reached under the sheet for Biscotti, but instead of finding his warm, wet tongue, fingers grasped her hand.

“Oh!” Tarina let out a little scream.

Giluia sat up like a ghost under the white sheet. She threw off the bedsheet and hurried to the side of her elderly aunt, who was struggling out from beneath the tablecloth. Uncovered, Zia patted her cheeks and hair with her fingers, like a blind woman hoping to verify that all her parts were still there.

Biscotti leaped from the purse and ran around the women’s slippered feet, yipping and jumping. Giulia wrapped her aunt in a huge hug and squeezed. Then she turned over her shoulder and asked, “It’s you, you stopped the words, didn’t you?”

Tarina looked up to see that words had, indeed, stopped falling from the sky. She swallowed and tested her voice. “Yes,” she said.

“Good,” Giulia said. “You did well. Now come inside and we’ll all get some tea.” 

Tarina looked down at her phone. The battery had grown so low that it was on power saving mode, and it could do nothing now but display the time. 4:20. Ten minutes to the appointment she had made weeks ago, an appointment she had flown halfway across the world to attend in absolute anonymity. Ten minutes until she could finally get it over with and end the last of the life Jonathan hadn’t wanted with her. The clinic was just a few blocks away. She and Giulia had passed it right where Giaccomo had been frozen.

Except, having read Jonathan’s life story, Tarina could no longer keep that appointment. The pain of having lost Jonathan and Byte and Generation Story was already too great. She would not lose any more of their family.

Giulia hugged one arm around Zia and began to lead her inside. Biscotti danced around them, his tail perky and wagging.

“You said you teach online research,” Tarina called to Giulia.

Giulia turned her head and studied Tarina. “Yes. It is my job.”

“I’m founding a new app,” Tarina said, “one that helps people tell their own life stories, and also helps them tell those stories to their loved ones so they can better understand each other. Building a strong algorithm that consistently works is going to require loads of research. Will you help me?”

“I would be honored to help with your research,” Giulia said. Keeping one arm around her aunt, she took a step back and put the other around Tarina’s shoulders. “We will use the computer, and we will find what you need to create your algorithym, you and I.”

Tarina nodded, blinking away unwanted tears.

“But, first,” Giulia said, “come inside for some tea?”

“Decaf tea,” Tarina said. Decaf was probably better for the baby.

Beneath a wordless sky, Tarina, Giulia, her aunt, and Biscotti walked up the stairs, across the balcony, and inside the house.

***

I love the question about relationships in “Wordfall” because the entire story is one big tangle of relationships. More than that, “Wordfall” explores what we owe each other in those relationships. At the heart of the story are two business partners who have perfectly understood each other in their creative and professional lives; sadly, when they attempt a romantic relationship, their expectations completely misalign. There’s also a son whose mother stopped smiling at his jokes. A father who kills himself rather than explain his huge mistake. A mother who questions what she owes her unborn child. A woman so attached to her elderly aunt that she loses her fiancé. Then, under the strange phenomenon of Wordfall, which renders the protagonist mute and warps words into precipitation that literally rains from the sky, a spontaneous friendship is sparked. The two strangers use very few words to communicate, yet they immediately and instinctively understand each other. Their friendship is a light shining on the basic necessities we owe each other in any relationship, and those are understanding and staying together, no matter what.

***

After growing up in small town Iowa, Heather Pagano studied classical trombone in Upstate New York. She then went on to live in Italy and in New York City. She now lives in Silicon Valley, California with her husband and two sons. Her fantasy and science fiction have appeared in publications like Abyss & Apex and Bewildering Stories. Her novella, The Declarer, is available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor at Hotch Potch Literature and Art. She writes about books, writing, and parenting on heather pagano.substack.com.