The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault

carefully … is that you can’t refer to citations and the painfully quiet office and not expect anyone to ever notice, can you? On some level, whoever’s doing this
wants
the cits to be noticed.”
    “Okay. Maybe. Probably.”
    “All right.” Mona licked her lips, and said, softly, “And then what?”
    “What do you mean, ‘and then what’?”
    “What,”
she said ominously, “does this person expect to happen next?”
    “I don’t know. Get fired, maybe.”
    “No. You’re getting ahead of yourself. When an editor first notices a fishy cit, what …
what…
does the bogus cit writer expect the editor to do about it?”
    “Get irritated. Maybe be annoyed that he can’t figure out who the scoundrel is, poisoning the sacred cit file with some dumb game. If he’s—or she’s—a really diehard dictionary person, I guess, maybe he’d even report it to the boss.”
    “And if not?”
    “Maybe he’d expect that editor to do just what you’re doing. Try and find more of the citations so they can be in on whatever the joke is.”
    “Right. So if this is a subversive kind of thing, like a privatejoke between editors, don’t you think the person who wrote this stuff would want to give another editor a way to find more than just one passing cit?”
    “A way to find more phony cits?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just supposed to be a casual thing. A one-time ha-ha passing across your desk. A little clean fun between dictionary nerds.”
    “But why so cryptic, then? You might be right, but I’m hoping you’re not. That’s why I want you to take these cits.”
    “What the hell am I supposed to do with them?”
    “Just
look
at them. I think maybe the cits themselves somehow can tell us how to find more. Look. These two cits are weird. We’ve already talked about that. They’re too long. A book with an exact day’s publication date, and a nonexistent publisher? Whoever wrote them wasn’t trying to make them seem like real cits. But I can’t figure out what exactly we’re supposed to see in the cits. Maybe it’s something I’m just not seeing. So I want you to try to figure it out. Maybe all it needs is a pair of fresh eyes.”
    I looked down at the cits on the table. “You want me to take these from you? Are you sure about that?”
    “I’ve made copies. Besides, I’ve read them so many times, I’ve got them memorized. Take another look at them and think about it. What else do they have in common that I haven’t thought of?”
    “I don’t know if this is such a great idea. You might have tons of free time for this kind of thing, but I’m still pretty slow with the defining.”
    “Just look at them, Billy. A few minutes here and there, maybe at home.”
    “And I just
got
this job—”
    “We’re not doing anything wrong.
We
didn’t write thecits. And Dan doesn’t—Dan wouldn’t care. Dan doesn’t care what the hell we do as long as we produce a reasonable amount of work in the seven working hours we’re there each day. Did you know that Raymond Shelling spends a couple hours a week browsing bottles of vintage wine on eBay?”
    “He’s the tall bald guy who’s always reading
Wine and Spirits?”
    “Yeah. And he’s a real efficient definer. So no one gives a crap what’s in that thermos of his. Just do your work, avoid any public mental breakdowns, and no one at Samuelson cares whatever else you’ve got going on. Certainly not Dan.”
    I sighed. “All right. What do you have so far?”
    Mona steepled her hands and leaned forward. “They’re both nouns, for one. That’s not much, obviously. Also, both cits are a little long, but have nothing else marked, just the one noun. I noticed that other words
could
have been marked. I might have marked the extended use of ‘warmblooded’ in the first cit, and I definitely would have marked ‘lost it’ in the second cit. So I looked up those words. I thought there might be something there. But nothing. It was a long