“I won’t say that word.” Keaton sat in his home office, talking to himself or maybe to someone we cannot see. The office was spacious, with wood furniture that shone in the soft light of the single lamp on the desk.
“People think less of you when you say that word.” Keaton’s thoughts now seemed directed at a taxidermy woodpecker. An observer in the room would not hear a response from the woodpecker—not that anyone was around. Keaton had been stewing on this topic for days. “The only reason to use it is as a weapon. It’s been weaponized against everyone.”
“People have said it to me, of course. But how do you know when someone means it? It’s just a thing that people say!”
Keaton rose from his chair and looked out the window at the glow of his neighbor’s porch light a way off. “I guess it’s okay to say in a song. But it’s too late now to say… I can’t go sing the word.”
“Anyway,” Keaton said, looking back at the woodpecker, “It’s implied.”
Keaton paced back and forth in the room for a minute. “It’s a word with so many different meanings that it has almost lost all meaning when you say it. It does not even faze people.”
Keaton went over to his desk and wrote the word down. Keaton looked at the word, shivered and turned back towards the woodpecker. “I hate looking at it. I hate the way it feels coming out of my mouth. It’s ugly. It’s vile.”
Keaton stormed out of the room. In the lamplight, the woodpecker appeared to look down at the piece of paper. The handwriting was almost illegible, and the word Keaton had been ranting about was there. The word—sorry—struck the page with all the fury that its author felt.
For of course, he was not.