The map drawn in tongues | Anatoly Loginov
FICTION
6/18/20266 min read
1. The Questionnaire That Starts It All
The communal kitchen in Turin smells of wet plaster, lavender laundry powder, and old coffee. The faucet over the sink drips — pléh… pléh… pléh… — slowly, like a metronome counting syllables instead of time.
Lira sits under the single bare bulb. Her pen hovers over the box that says "Country of Origin." The letters in the form begin to vibrate, as if arguing over which alphabet to be born into.
Shqipëria — scratches her throat with sharp consonants.
Italia — stretches its vowels like dough under her grandmother's fingers.
Albania — short, dry, like an exhale.
Maria enters without knocking. Her dialect from Basilicata is thick as olive oil.
"Pij coffee," she says. "You're staring too long. That paper will eat you."
"They're asking where I'm from," Lira whispers.
Maria looks at the empty box and crosses herself. The emptiness is not empty: it pulses, like a heart that hasn't yet learned to speak.
2. First Layer: Albanian as Terrain
At night, Lira spreads out butcher paper. Albanian comes from under her hand heavy as stone. Each consonant is a peak: kj, gj, sh, zh, ç. The letter "ë" — a fissure where breath falls through.
She writes the words and feels her fingertips grow rough, as if climbing the cliffs of Shkodër. Her throat goes dry — the same dryness that accompanied her grandmother's curses and songs.
In a dream, her grandmother Drita kneads dough, her palms smelling of pepper and flour. Drita speaks a dialect where the future is just an extended present. Her voice is a path — thin, almost gone.
Lira draws that path as the thinnest line, visible only at a certain angle of light. If you breathe, the line trembles; if you laugh, it fades. The map remembers what memory loses.
3. Italian as a Coastline
In the morning, Italian settles onto the paper softly, like a wave on sand. The words roll: casa, mare, sole, domani. Italian rounds Lira's lips, loosens her shoulders, lightens her step. When she speaks Italian, warmth spreads in her chest — like sun on stone.
Luca, the barista, tries to speak slowly:
"Allora… tu… da dove vieni veramente?"
His words are waves that knock Lira off her feet. She answers in Albanian — too harsh; in English — flat; in Italian — quiet and true:
"Non lo so più."
Italian makes her more beautiful and slightly alien to herself. On the map, the coastline curves; in some places, the wave encroaches on the Albanian mountains and leaves salty traces on the paper.
4. English as Airports and Transit Zones
English is air. Lira draws it as a network of terminals and flight lines: [LTN] — ✈ — [IST] — ✈ — [MXP]. The words okay, sorry, next, boarding, security sprout as cold threads. When she speaks English, her fingertips go numb; her voice becomes flat as an announcement.
On a plane, a man in a suit asked:
"Where are you from originally?"
"I don't know anymore."
"But originally."
His insistence sounds like a baggage tag. Lira draws him as a vast terminal with the sign THIS FLIGHT IS OVERBOOKED — beautiful, empty, smelling of nowhere. The English layer is the coldest; under it, the map grows slightly icy.
5. Collision: Borders Begin to Move
On the fifth day, the map wakes up. Albanian peaks have shifted west. The Italian coast has retreated, leaving a gray strip — no man's land. English weed-words (yes, no, problem, document, wait) sprout there and make it prickly.
Lira touches the paper: the peaks scratch her skin, the coast leaves her fingers sticky, the English no burns cold. Inside, her throat hurts — the way it does when languages fight. Sometimes she wakes up and speaks a word that didn't exist before: domaljë — somewhere between domani and nesër.
Signora Bianchi, her Italian teacher, speaks plainly:
"You have to choose one language. One. To live here."
Her voice is a knife. But Lira is not one language — she is their collision and their bridge.
6. Bureaucracy: Paper That Refuses Multiplicity
The migration office smells of paper and exhaustion. The clerk flips through passports, frowns.
"Your name is written differently: Lira, Lyra, Lirë. Country of origin — empty. What are you?"
Lira tries to explain that she is three people with different body temperatures. The clerk asks her to choose one version. At that moment, a single letter in one of Lira's documents trembles and shifts a millimeter to the right — as if the paper itself decided to help.
The clerk blinks. Fatigue softens her — but she pushes her chair back a centimeter, as if afraid that uneven people might be contagious.
7. Loss and Fear: A Language Slips Away
One day, Lira tries to say a word in Albanian — and it disappears. She feels an emptiness open in her throat, as if someone tore a piece of her map away. The word slips through her fingers, leaving bitterness in her mouth.
She runs home, grabs the butcher paper, but her grandmother's path has grown pale. Panic — cold and dense — squeezes her chest. This is not just forgetting. This is physical pain, like a dislocation.
She closes her eyes and whispers what she remembers. Something clicks in her throat — and the word returns, but different now: with Italian breath, with English rhythm. Lira understands: a language can be lost, and then rewoven.
8. Hearing the Future: Language in the Crowd
In the market crowd, Lira hears a rhythm that belongs to none of her languages. Teenagers laugh, mixing words, gestures, melodies. A street musician sings a verse where Albanian roots lie on Italian intonation with an English chorus. It's not chaos — it's rhythm.
A little girl runs up to Lira:
"Ciao! Hallo! Mirë dita! Wie geht's?"
She hops from language to language as easily as stepping over puddles. Her speech already carries a new rhythm — neither Albanian, nor Italian, nor English. Lira hears a promise: a language not yet born, but already stirring.
9. Birth: Lira Creates a New Language
That night, Lira tries to join things: Albanian roots with Italian endings, English shortcuts with her grandmother's path.
domani + nesër → domanër
dashuri + love → lovuri
home in Albanian script — a strange glyph that gives warmth in her chest when she says it aloud.
When she speaks these words, something clicks inside her: her throat relaxes, her shoulders drop, the tremor leaves her palms. The white spot on the map begins to glow with a soft milky light. The languages stop fighting — they intertwine, like fingers.
10. Reconciliation: A Quiet Scene
One day on the kitchen, Maria sings an old song, and Lira picks up the chorus — in her own way: with an Albanian accent and an Italian melody. Signora Bianchi passes by, stops, and listens. The clerk from the office, waiting for bread in the queue, smiles and hums a word she heard in childhood.
On the butcher paper, the Albanian path meets the Italian coast: the path enters the bay and becomes a street. The English terminal, once so cold, casts off one corridor where laughter sounds. It is a whisper that changes the shape of the map.
11. Finale: "See Attached Map"
In the morning, Lira writes in the box with a green pen:
See attached map
She folds the butcher paper. The mountain ridges don't break; the coast bends; the English lines hiss but do not destroy. The white spot glows through the paper.
Maria shakes her head:
"You're crazy, figlia mia."
"Maybe," Lira answers. "But now I'm whole."
Days later, a clerk — a tired man who has never traveled farther than Genoa — opens the envelope. The letters on Lira's form begin slowly to rearrange themselves before his eyes: they stretch into a thin line leading to the folded map. He unfolds the butcher paper, runs his finger over the mountains and feels real grit; over the coast — salt; over the English lines — cold and the smell of airports. When his finger touches the white spot, warmth rises from it, and in the clerk's head, a word is born that existed in no language.
He stamps the form. In the box marked "Decision," a word appears — written by his hand, but not invented by him. A word in a language that has just been born.
Approved.
The faucet in the kitchen, which used to drip pléh… pléh…, now drips in a new rhythm — pléh‑pléh‑plék — and it seems that even it is learning to speak.
Inserted Artifacts
gj
sh
zh
kj
casa — mare —
amore
domanër · lovuri · homë
The End
I am the place where languages meet, part, bleed, make peace, and give birth to one another.
Anatoly Loginov is a writer, educator, and clinical psychologist based in Saint Petersburg. He is the Grand Prix winner of the All-Russian literary competition "Ecology of the Soul - 2026." His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Asymptote (USA), Rowayat (Egypt), Space and Time Magazine, FlashFlood (UK), Flash Phantoms, Foofaraw Press, and the Kazakh literary journal Dactyl. He is also the author of several educational and popular science books.