Punctuation in Three Acts
‘
(Apostrophe)
A crooked finger beckoning, “Come here, you sexy thing.”
Apostrophe is a fingernail paring, a peel curling away from the heart
of an apple under the pressure of a metal blade; something coming
apart. At the same time, apostrophe is typography’s waxing moon.
Something narrow growing larger.
Apostrophe’s first definition in my dictionary is “the
act of turning away.” The second definition is the common one,
“a mark used to indicate omission of letters or figures.”
After that, “the possessive case.” Are they so opposite,
possessing and turning away?
Apostrophes confuse beginners. The comma thing in the air, a beginner
said to me, unready to fall in love with the whispers blending apostrophe’s
four syllables. How do you tell when to use an apostrophe for the
singular possessive or the plural, the beginner asks. This depends,
I answer, on how many you have. And where in the sentence is the thing
that belongs to Jessica? The noun – me – wants to pull
something close, to grow larger.
An apostrophe is a shepherd’s crook. (Note the apostrophe there,
the crook that belongs to the shepherd.) A curved and subtle gesture
that creates multitudes.
( )
(Parenthesis)
Parenthetical is one of my favorite words to speak aloud. Parenthetical
– say it, there in the privacy of your own reading. It clicks
with the sound of bones, doesn’t it? Sounds satisfying, like
dominoes falling.
Parenthetical is the adjectival form of parenthesis, which Webster’s
7th New Collegiate identifies as a “remark or passage that departs
from the theme of a discourse.” This is true enough for a grammarian,
(a grandma? a mammary?) but sidesteps the heart of the parenthesis,
and its reason for being.
Break the mother-word up and find parent and thesis. A byproduct,
then of “the one that brings forth” (Webster’s again.)
Parenthetical. Curved around and protective of the meaning without
which a sentence can not be its entire self. Like the ribs that hold
the heart in. Like the embrace that holds the soul in.
?
(Question Mark)
Once upon a time, when I was about to be a teenager,
I was infatuated with a novel about a cheerleader in the generation
immediately before mine. She sometimes wore her hair in a ponytail,
which the author described as an “upside-down question mark.”
This read as an offhand description, a cipher of an image, but I could
not shake loose the idea of a question mark hanging upside down. (My
own hair was a nest of stray strands, glossy and dark. Pins could
not hold it. My ponytails lay flat and heavy, like beaver tails, like
upside-down exclamation points. Inversion deprived them of their exclamatory
power.)
If a question mark hung upside down, would it cling with claws, like
a dormant bat? Released from rest, would it slice like a scythe? Babysitters
for all eternity have told the story of the claw – the disembodied
prosthesis or alien hand or killer’s grip (your teenaged sitter’s
personal taste in gore decided what kind of claw scoured your dreams)
- that sliced off the swain’s head on a dark night in Lover’s
Lane. A sideways question mark.
Question marks may be used between the parts of a series, the Harbrace
College Handbook advises. Did he plan the riot? Employ assistants?
Give the signal to begin? Question marks are provocateurs, rumor-starters,
gossips.
Jessica Handler lives in Atlanta. Her essays have appeared in Brain, Child magazine, The Chattahoochee Review, Brevity, the Southern Arts Journal, the Healing Muse, and other publications. She enjoys saying “Monkeybicycle.”