If the first word came crashing, arriving in the night like a promise of revenge, the second burbled up like a bead of blood along a shallow cut, or the sound of a nanny goat abandoned in her milking. We watched the words gathering as we would watch starving animals on the periphery of the firelight, knowing them too weak to do anything but bare their fangs, but feeling an instinctual dismay nonetheless.

Eventually, with time, the boldest among us took the words inside ourselves, rolling them between tongue and lip like ant eggs. Others immediately began erecting small boxes, knowing there would soon be more words, more need to hold them still, sheltered and safe like captive monks. As the words grew thicker, categories and lineages grew. Our fellow villagers became our sisters, our lovers, our mothers. In our exuberance we lay down whole carpets of words for those we most wanted to entice; the shyest and purest among us had so many paths to choose from they were often paralyzed, inscribing new words on their thumbs or shoulders or feet as they gazed. Language grew and grew, and with time the purest among us began to function as living dictionaries, their skin alive with words on top of words, and when we wanted to say something particularly difficult we would call them in and have them turn, slowly, as we picked among the offerings like ripe fruit.

Inevitably some among us were accused of consuming more than our fair share of words, and more boxes were built, and more records kept, so that we could each participate on equal footing. Some hoarded their allotted words, while others ran out mid-morning and had to resort to gesture after gesture, a pantomime game that we all soon grew tired of playing. The purest, however, continued to walk among us adorned with their scrawl, silent more by convention than by law, their skin saying all that needed to be said, the sharpened stone always at hand.

In this way we became proud of our language. We guarded it the way you'd guard a spring or a particularly milky goat, piling branches to obscure the sweet water or keeping her in a shallow alcove on the cliff face, several hours' perilous journey to and from, some of the younger among us claiming the honor of milking duties as if they were finally arriving at their own true names.

We rarely met anyone from other villages, but when we did we would resort to rude gestures, both because we did not want to to deplete our daily word stock, but also because anything of true value is best hidden, lest it be taken from you in the night by thieves or death or a barrel dropped on your dwelling while you toss and turn near the fire. Some of us resented these chance encounters, mostly because we had to use our stock of words to report them, the slyest cleverly asking one-word questions that required several-word answers, a smug curl to their lips as they watched us run through our stock the way spilled water leaves runnels in the fallow dust.

Therefore we began to hide when we heard sounds in the forest, and this became habit, so that we found ourselves hiding not only from the occasional other, but also from small creatures in the bracken, wind in the branches, or the drip of water from a leaf after rain. The best hiders were renowned, and we would watch them disappear into branches or moss, standing still and of course silent as the colors reformed themselves unbroken; they could stand for days and we would only see them if sleep finally overcame them and their heads nodded downward, or their arm, extended to mimic a young hemlock branch, drooped too far. We started visiting the forest just to try to spot these invisible watchers, and as they improved their art we failed more and more to discover them. Over time we forgot that they'd once been of us, that they'd once had language too, and finally that they existed at all.

Meanwhile our beloved dictionaries collected more and more words, and finally it was decided that our daily quotas could be raised. Ironically, while most of us initially welcomed the idea, the way you'd naturally welcome a sudden doubling of goat milk or a tripling of fruit, we found that when put into practice, when we spoke and spoke and filled our mouths with pulp and sound, afterwards we felt lethargic and dispirited, slightly nauseous, indeed as if we had gorged ourselves on milk or fruit and now could only lie supine and moan, no one left to tend the fire or ward off the falling barrels.

And so we spoke less and felt better. At first we kept close track of each unspent word, watching our hoard grow and grow, building more boxes and stacking them higher and higher, full of the unsaid, but always close at hand in case we needed them. But eventually we had to admit to ourselves that we were happier with this stricter quota— it kept us lean and wary, muscled and eager, the way the high cliffs kept our young goat-milkers fit and impervious.

No one was quite ready, though, to abandon the unspoken words we were accruing. What if, we thought, there came an emergency, an attack on the village, a particularly loathsome barrel, and we needed to draw from that store or face ruin and extinction? So we built more walls of more boxes of unspoken words, though our records now were far more haphazard, and one box might contain a single word for a fireant's nest, while another might overspill with a description of a newborn goat's fluted ears, or the way rancid water as well as sweet reflects a new moon's false light.

Eventually our walls of boxes were high enough that the more elderly among us did not feel comfortable climbing to the top to add another box, and we recruited climbers from the proud class of cliff-scaling goat-milkers. For them, wall climbing was as simple as swallowing or mud bathing, and while some held the task in disdain, others, beginning to age themselves, felt it wasn't dishonorable to help when asked with great formality and a good many words to do so.

Perhaps because the task was at first so simple for them, though, they stacked the upper boxes in complex patterns, making sure that wall integrity wasn't compromised, but at the same time leaving climbing puzzles for those who would next ascend. Eventually these wall puzzles became so interesting and complex that cliff-scaling to milk the goats became the less desirable avocation, and we had trouble convincing anyone to make that journey. In fact, our milk supply dwindled alarmingly, and while at first we ate more fruit and roots to try to compensate, as we lay flat on our backs by the fire pit, ill this time not from overindulgence but from a purely physical weakness, we had to admit that our health and vitality depended on our daily allotment of goat milk more than we had realized. Arranging for the goats to be milked became a recurring headache, and eventually we began bribing the climbers with extra boxes: we would give an extra journey up the walls, with extra boxes to place, to anyone volunteering to then milk the goats immediately afterwards.

As we had learned in our time of intemperance, words were abundant, and we had thought that in this era of plenty we would have more than enough words to spare, and that producing extra boxes of unused words for the escalating bribes to our reluctant goatherds would be a simple task. But instead, as the bribes and walls grew, we were forced to speak less and less, saying "yes" where "absolutely, you can count on us, as a goat can count on her milker" used to stand, or "fine" where "We began the day as an underground river, but by afternoon we were feeling more like a burbling spring, both free of the ever-present darkness but also aware of our own mutability" formerly would have done.

With admirable positivity, we took our new word diet as a creative challenge, reawakening some of the gestures from our earliest days, and attempting to stretch a single "maybe" into at least three or four separate strands of meaning. Soon it became second nature to think more than we said, and for each word to function as the tip of the tallest fir emerging from the forest, signaling a whole ecosystem below, furred animals and stinging insects creating an unseen cacophony, alive and buzzing with implication.

Our boxes of unspoken words now stretched high above us in curving walls, which turned our village into a series of deep corridors, much like a honey comb or an ant nest deep under the ground. In our leisure hours we would walk these corridors in velvet shade, single file, humming to ourselves. Meeting someone coming from the opposite direction was now a complex and fraught ritual, as we wordlessly gestured and contorted our bodies to pass each other without touching the walls, which the climbers had rendered perfectly balanced for climbing but vulnerable to any other kind of pressure. These "passage" encounters, silent and ornate, slowly became our most prized and intimate moments, and many season-long romances began with a passage. Most of us, in fact, would spend both morning and afternoon hours walking the corridors far below the open sky, hoping for at least one such encounter each day.

Meeting a dictionary, though, was the exception. Her skin was not to be touched, for obvious reasons, and it was impossible to pass another without skin meeting skin. Therefore we were forced simply to reverse direction and go back the way we had come, while the purest among us continued their stately walk. With time we learned to sense when a dictionary was approaching— there was a faint odor of scab and crust, a waffling sense of an unopened mouth— and we would take an early turning to avoid her. The purest of us, always silent, were now almost entirely solitary as well, and if at times they sat down in the dirt floor of a corridor and wept, or built guttering fires to roast small rodents, we would never know.

Eventually the ever-growing and towering walls began to feel vaguely unsafe, even though we had infinite trust in our young box-placers' skills, and almost without comment we started to spend more and more time in the forest. We would keep two or three words at the ready, in case of what we could not imagine, but these were rarely if ever used.

As silence descended, occasionally we felt the prickling sensation of being observed, catalogued, weighed and recorded, as if we ourselves were boxes being placed precisely in a complex construction, even though our feet stayed firmly among the ferns. Only after many seasons did the more perceptive among us finally discern our famous forest watchers, whose existence long ago had become a legend among us, but who we now saw lived and breathed much as we did, though their fingernails were mossy green and their teeth jagged and bark-like.

We performed many gestures attempting to tell them how glad we were that they were not simply myths or the stories of those who had become punch-drunk from too many decanted words, that instead they were flesh and blood and limb, but our rich stock of gestures had diminished in our time of plenty, and all we could communicate was a diffuse gladness, the same gestures we would have used for finding an abandoned hive with a bit of honey still clinging to the cells, or successfully extracting a thorn from a foot.

Nevertheless, we felt the wonder and elation of a legend brought into the living world. But perhaps inevitably, over time the living boggy one, skin cracked and toenails split, unmoving from long force of habit, with a concise odor all its own, could not bear the weight of the legend of the Mossy Ones, and the more mean-spirited among us began to pantomime the idea that these were not in fact a legend come to life, but instead neighboring villagers attempting, in their inadequate and misguided way, to recreate our own glorious myths. We felt simultaneously amused and deeply offended, and we were tempted to spend some of our hoarded words on a tongue-lashing they would not soon forget. But in the end we made peace with the idea that everyone aspires to something, and if our neighbors were so impoverished as to need to borrow and inhabit our myths, then they were indeed living out a hell of their own making, and we would leave them to it.

The forest was large enough, however, to mostly avoid these encounters, and as our village walls became higher and ever more precarious we began even sleeping in the forest, agreeing without consultation that this time we would not use walls to demarcate our sleeping places, walls having become for obvious reasons not the most restful of associations, but instead find hollows and nooks wherever they naturally occurred. Soon we were emerging from the forest only to gather our allotment of goatmilk and leave our payment of words, the climbers now constructing the boxes themselves and leaving them empty and waiting each morning next to the shining pails of goatmilk.

And so the years passed.

If the first roar came crashing, the subsequent sounds arrived like a death of a thousand falls, each sound claiming for itself the glory of being the last, the grandest, and immediately disabused of this aggrandizement by a following sound, which went on and on in an endless river of assault. When the last sound did come, we hardly registered it, crouched in our hollows and fernbeds, the event itself having produced in us the sensation of a rebirth, a new order, a new becoming. We stood at the edge of the forest and gazed at the fallen walls, the boxes upon boxes upon boxes which now no longer resembled boxes but instead the rolling hills of the kind our goats loved to ramble in the long ago.

For several days following we could hear the goats up on the cliffs, bleating their faithful calls to their milkers, before finally guttering into a dusty silence. The new absence of goatmilk produced in us a constant dizziness, which itself turned into a kind of vigilance, a sharpening perception of depth and balance in the world, tuning our senses anew. Occasionally one of us would see what looked like a dictionary, continuing her stately walk now along the edge of the forest, skirting the boxy hills, but in our heightened state we weren't sure if we saw her or simply wanted to see her, and when we tried to communicate that idea to others, our gestures were brief and listless, and we might as well have been saying there's a new anthill near the tall fir, or late at night I remember the taste of goat milk by the fireside, thrumming and creamy in the early autumn.