Mistress Susan waited until she could see, by the vacant neutrality of Meredith’s posture and the sudden slackening of her jaw, that the trance had deepened to a receptive, almost dreamlike state. She circled Meredith’s chair, her fingers laced behind her back, as if considering the best way to paint something delicate onto a vulnerable and newly primed canvas. When she spoke, her words came slowly, the consonants softened, the vowels slightly drawn out, so that Meredith, and perhaps the entire audience, had no choice but to attend to the architecture of the uttered words themselves.

“Language is a strange thing,” Mistress Susan said, her voice echoing with a professor’s cadence, yet still carrying the intimacy of a whispered secret. “Every word we say draws an invisible border between us and the world. Every sentence is a bridge, but also a fence. What we understand, we let in. What we don’t, we keep out. Sometimes, the only thing separating one person’s world from another’s is the way we hear what’s being said.”

Meredith nodded, or rather, her head nodded for her. She was aware of these words in the way one is aware of weather: abstractly, distantly, as though they were being transmitted through a thick pane of museum glass. Mistress Susan allowed the silence to settle for a while, then bent down so that her lips could almost brush the shell of Meredith’s ear.

“Sometimes,” she continued, “if you listen just the right way, you’ll find that what people say is entirely up to you. You are the gatekeeper. You decide if language means what it’s supposed to, or whether it means nothing at all. Would you like to try something?”

Meredith’s lips parted, but the impulse to answer faded before it reached her tongue. She felt herself agreeing, vaguely, in a way that required no words.

“That’s very good,” Mistress Susan whispered. “Now, until I say otherwise, whenever someone speaks to you, you will hear a language you can’t understand. It’ll sound like words, but the meaning will slip away. It’s not a trick, just a demonstration of how much power your mind has. Nod if you understand.”

Meredith nodded. She could already feel a subtle interference building in her head, like static between radio channels. It was a weird sensation, but far from unpleasant. Was this always how being in a trance felt?

Mistress Susan grinned with the delight of a scientist about to run one of her favorite experiments. She straightened herself, looked at Dominic on the stage, and addressed him with a gentle, “Would you like to ask Meredith something?”

Dominic hesitated, looked from Mistress Susan to Meredith, then cleared his throat. “Meredith, are you alright?” he asked.

To Meredith, the gentle inquiry arrived as a string of sounds that, while familiar in contour and cadence, failed to resolve into meaning. It was as if the words had been run through an algorithm that randomized every letter, creating nothing but gibberish. Even the cadence of Dominic’s concern had been emptied of its usual significance. The sounds were there, but the sense had been hollowed out.

Meredith’s face reddened with confusion, and the audience laughed, though whether at her expense or Dominic’s she couldn’t say. She looked at Mistress Susan, as if for guidance, but when Mistress Susan spoke, the same transformation occurred: “Nahn-jes-so fa-sil, yeh kin hapkin.” The words sounded almost like English, but just out of reach, as if she were trying to overhear a conversation through a thick apartment wall.

Mistress Susan smiled. “You’re doing perfectly,” she said, but to Meredith it came through as something entirely pointless.” A rush of giddy disbelief hit her. She was not only unable to understand spoken language, but even her own inner monologue seemed to dissolve into a babble of disordered phonemes.

Mistress Susan gestured to the audience. “Notice what’s happened,” she said, turning toward them, her voice carrying the air of an expert conducting a live demonstration. “Even though Meredith hasn’t moved from her spot, she is now separated from us by the thinnest of veils. She can see us, she can hear us, but the bridge of language is temporarily gone.” She turned back to Meredith, her eyes softening. “How do you like it?” she asked.

Meredith blinked several times, stunned by the unreality of the sensation. She felt a wild urge to laugh, or maybe cry. “I—uh—” she started, but her words became scrambled too. The effect was almost intoxicating in its strangeness, and for the first time in her life, Meredith wondered what it would feel like to permanently inhabit a private, wordless world.

Mistress Susan held up a single finger, signaling a return to quietness. She let a full cycle of the lights pass - warmth, fade, warmth, fade - before she spoke again.

“Do you see?” Mistress Susan said, her tone as proud as a magician after a flawless trick, “It’s possible to change how we relate to language, even in an instant.” The words landed with their usual clarity for Dominic and the audience, but to Meredith they remained a fascinating, impenetrable code.

Dominic nodded, a slow grin spreading across his face as he glanced at Meredith, who, for the moment, existed in a pocket of silence, cut off but not alone.

Mistress Susan let the afterimages of her words linger, then gently placed a reassuring hand on Meredith’s shoulder.

“And as just as easily as this perception can change through a simple suggestion, the idea can be anchored to a specific word. Right now, Meredith hears gibberish all the time, but what if she only does so if I say something specific? Let’s go for a simple trigger.”

She paced in a slow arc, her heeled steps echoing in the suspension, and turned to address the audience directly. “Think of it like this: language is a current, flowing at all times beneath our conversations. Hypnosis can dam the current, or reroute it, or, if you know the right mechanism, build a sluice gate that opens and closes on command. Triggers are sluice gates. The mind can be taught to flood or dry up, depending on the cue.”

Her voice was now less like a hypnotist’s and more like a philosopher’s, instructive and speculative at once. She spoke softly, directly into Meredith’s receptive mind: “From now on, whenever you hear the word wind, it will be as before - the words will lose meaning, become gibberish, like the wind itself, carrying away everything you try to catch. Otherwise, you’ll understand everything normally. And you won’t remember that the trigger is the word wind. Is that clear?”

Meredith’s head lolled gently, the faintest smile playing across her lips as if the idea of an automatic, invisible switch appealed to her on some deep level. Mistress Susan straightened, faced the audience once more, and explained: “Anchoring a response to a trigger is one of the simplest, yet most profound, demonstrations of suggestibility. The conscious mind can’t intercept it. The effect comes as a surprise, even to the person experiencing it.”

She paused for dramatic effect, her finger tracing the rim of the microphone. “Let’s try it in action,” she said, and gestured to Dominic. “Meredith, could you tell Dominic how you feel right now?”

Meredith blinked, as though surfacing from a warm, silent bath. “I feel…relaxed. Kind of floaty. Honestly, it’s like I’m watching all of this from a few feet above my head.” Her words were clear and untroubled. The audience tittered with delight at the return of her normal speech, and Dominic smiled in relief.

Mistress Susan nodded approvingly. “Good. Notice how her comprehension is perfectly intact now. Watch what happens if…” She paused, her gaze sharpening on Meredith. “…the wind begins to blow,” she finished, letting her last words hang in the air like a shimmering heat mirage.

The change was instant and total: Meredith’s eyes widened in confusion, her mouth searched for purchase on a word and found only shapeless fragments. “Uh—fuh,” she stammered, and the rest dissolved into a liquid garble, a rush of nonsense syllables that left her blinking in perplexity.

“You really are a wonderful subject,” Mistress Susan thought.