who created the question mark?

The terrier, an opal-colored mess of curls named Alfie, howled at the falling snow as it frosted the window. He had been doing that for ten odd minutes, but none of the drinking folk seemed to notice except for the old crypt-keeper, Mr. Barrow, who didn’t fancy the talk of ‘sophisticated folk.’ Buncha rubbish, he thought it. Alfie had the right idea—he didn’t like the snow, so he barked at it and hoped it went away.

Unfortunately for Mr. Barrow, he was a man in a supposedly civilized world. And so as the others gathered ‘round the brick-stone fireplace, passing ‘round a bottle of Woodford whiskey, he sat by his lonesome, passing Alfie treats from under the comfort of his twill blanket. Leftovers from the night’s dinner, crumbs of biscuit and chunks of potato, scraps of ham and, if he were good, maybe even the marrow-filled bone, got him sitting and wagging his tail next to the poor old man who just wanted to sleep the storm away. They were trapped here, yes, buried in by the rising dunes of snow outside—but did they have to fill such a sorry time with jabbering?

The scene was like a renaissance painting with no vision. A Michaelangelo brushed-out by just another ordinary Michael. The cast was this: a Pastor who had never read the bible, a Doctor on crutches, a cocaine-addled Detective, an illiterate Scholar, and a Novelist who couldn’t stop substituting himself for his own characters. The setting: a dimly-lit, smoke-hazed nowhere. A lumber-log cottage built on graveyard grounds meant only for Mr. Barrow. Here he respected the dead by quietly minding his own business. Now these boneheads were likely to get him haunted with all their stomping and shouting.

They were gathered here because an old friend of theirs passed on. Mr. Barrow didn’t know the bloke, he just tended to the gravesite. But he must have lived a full life to bring all these eclectic bastards together. Two hours ago they hadn’t known each other’s names. Now they chatted like old mates meeting in a pub.

Their puzzling topic of debate?

who created the question mark?

The illiterate Scholar, who had been rambling incoherently for a few minutes, spilling booze and whiskey-soaked words, was leading the charge. “Al-cuuuuuuuuuin of Yooooooooooork,” he said, twanging his voice with an obnoxious British accent. “Came up with it firs’. ‘Punctus interro-somethin’, he called it. Prolly sat ‘round wit’ the knights, laughing, saying ‘punctus, punctus, punctus!’”

The Scholar tumbled out his chair, tipping the bottle into the fire and causing it to roar. The other men cackled and ditched their drinks into the fire as well. Mr. Barrow just kept feeding the dog.

Next up was the Detective. He retrieved another bottle of liquor from his luggage, this one cheap gin, and spoke like his words were late to work and chasing down the bus. “Well, what would Mr. Cherry have thought? Nothing! Nothing at all. I tell you, that man, he didn’t think. No-sir-ee. That man didn’t think because he already had all the answers! Best damned detective there ever was, I say. The best.”

“What malarky! Mr. Cherry was no detective!” spat the Pastor, who was sober but sniffing a glass of liquor with the familiarity of someone who wished he wasn’t. “He was a fine man of the cloth! It was he who, when I was but a boy, taught me everything I know about the good book!”

“He certainly said ‘Oh Jesus’ a lot when performing surgeries with me,” the Doctor said. “Once he pulled out a man’s beating heart and know what he said?”

“Oh Jesus?” the Pastor said, hands to his heart, reminiscing on Cherry’s gentle-natured soul.

“Nope. He said—‘and here we have the lungs.’” The Doctor shook his head. “Fired him that day.”

The Pastor softly bowed. “Amen.”

They all raised their freshly-poured glasses to that. Alfie raised his half-chewed bone. Mr. Barrow, who had finally caught some shut-eye, snored.

The Scholar, still on the ground, now gazing into the crackling fire like it was a glittering diamond, muttered a slushy sentence. “Some also buh-weave the coo-coo-question mark takes iiiiiiinspiration from a kitty-cat’s wittle tail. Hee-hee-hee…”

Then he added his own baritone snoozing to the symphony of snores.

The Novelist, stuck now as ‘Billard the Pelican’ from his children’s novel Billard the Pelican, perched on the edge of a rocking chair, flapped his wings, and squawked.

“You people will believe that a cat created the question mark, but not our Lord and Savior?” The Pastor snatched the gin off the table, shielded his face from God, and took a swig straight from the bottle. “Shame on you!”

“Shame on me? Shame on you for not seeing the facts!” The Detective scrubbed his nose, streaking blood across his suit-sleeve. He was tip-tapping his toes on the hardwood in an oddly-syncopated rhythm. “People came up with the question mark, same as they came up with the question, and they lie and dodge ‘em all the time!”

“Lies are but another one of God’s challenges,” the Pastor said. “Men who choose to lie are men who embrace sin, such as yourself!”

While those two were chatting, the Doctor had unzipped his medical bag and laid out a stunning array of tools. Scalpels and tongs and what looked to be an ice-cream-scooper. He, with rubber gloves on and a red marker in hand, was scrawling lines across the Novelist’s head. “Questions arise in the brain. Of that I am certain. I haven’t found exactly where yet, but I’ve been searching rather intensely, I assure you. Would any of you like to help me lobotomize this tortured soul so that we may find the answer?”

The Novelist reached up, grabbed the Doctor’s tie, and pulled him in close for a sultry stare-down. He now thought he was the luscious ‘Samantha Garland’ from his book Samantha Garland, a femme fatale who spoke sweetly enough to undress anyone’s secrets. “You don’t gotta cut open my head, sugar, to get inside me.” Then, ‘Samantha’ looked to everyone else. ‘Besides, a question is different from a question mark.” ‘Samantha’ looked to the Scholar. “Ain’t that right, brainy-bones?”

“Yeeezzzzir. Ma’am? Hrrrk.” The Scholar covered his mouth, stifling a burp, then continued on. “Questions have been ‘round since humans firs’ learned to blah, blah, blah! But punctuation? That came with writin’! Scribble-scrabble, penzil, paper, all’at. It waz an attempt to replicate the hmmmmmming hum of curiosity!”

The Novelist made his finger into a gun and pointed it at the Doctor’s chest. He was now ‘Sir Iozebalde White’, a teacher turned western-gunslinger and star of Sir Iozebalde White. “See, pardner? Yer barkin’ down the wrong tree. Yer searching for where in the mind it comes from, but it ain’t nuthin’ philosophic. The question mark comes from the right here, the fingers.” Iozebalde made a big show of wriggling his fingers back and forth.

“But out of which man’s finger and when?” the Detective asked. His own fingers were jittering like electric volts coursed through them. “Because that bastard deserves his laurels!”

“Even if it were created by man,” the Pastor said. “That does not mean it was not a gift from the Lord Himself. Because, if we are to believe it is He who created us, then it must also be it is He who leads us to each moment. It is He who guided man to ask the first question and He who put the idea in their head to use a question mark to emphasize it. Even now, it is He who brought us together by bringing Mr. Cherry home.”

“Trust me, if god saw the chemicals polluting Mr. Cherry’s body, he would have shuddered.” The Doctor, realizing his lobotomical ambitions were not suited for the moment, was now pouring himself a glass of gin. “Methamphetamine, cocaine, a splash of heroin and a trickle of opium. Our dear friend—he launched an all-out attack on his own heart. Very fascinating, isn’t it? I actually have his heart here, in a jar, if you want to—”

The Detective leaped to his feet. “—If you pull a man’s heart out a jar I will arrest you for grave-robbery!”

“But maybe, using it, we can commune with the dead!” the Pastor said. “And find out who Mr. Cherry thinks created the question mark!”

“Wuzzat, wizzat, woozat, hee-hee.” The Scholar rolled back and forth on the floor like a toddler.

“The mind, the Doctor says. The hands, the Detective says. God, the Pastor says. And cats, the Scholar says.” All eyes turned to the Novelist, who suddenly sat upright, looking rather studious. No longer was he the water-brained man slipping in the oils of his own imagination. Here, he was himself, a man of many great words. “But I earn my rather exuberant living through the act of pressing ink-soaked question marks onto paper. So, do you know who I think created them?”

Everyone in the room waited with bated breath, curious to see what answer the creative genius, whose enigmatic mind had captivated the world for decades, had come up with.

And when he spoke?

He was back in character, this time playing ‘The Creator’ from his series The Creator.

“I DID! I CREATED EVERYTHING! I AM THE PROGENITOR OF EXISTENCE! BOW—BOW BEFORE ME!”

At this, the room broke into an indecipherable rabble as the men devolved into harsh insults. They spit in one-another’s faces and shamed one-another’s mothers. They broke bottles and lifted fire-pokers, ready for a fight. And worst of all they woke up poor Mr. Barrow, whose blood boiled as he listened to the idiots ramble and realized they knew not a damn thing they were talking about—that these men, much like Mr. Cherry himself, who’d come here under the guise of being a former morgue assistant in need of work, who’d actually died from huffing embalming fluid, were con-men.

And so, when they all broke out of the argument and turned to Mr. Barrow and desperately said: “Mr. Barrow, who do you think created the question mark?”, he looked down at Alfie, who was doing what he’d always done and barking at what he disliked and decided to join them in their devious roleplay.

He looked at them and said: “You wanna know who I think invented the question mark?”

And then:

“Bark, bark, BARK!”

And all the men barked back.

THE END