The word new

The word new is written on the day the writer is excited, and read for a year afterwards.

It goes on the sticker, the top of the menu, the shop window, the banner across the site, the first line of the email. It is put there by somebody who has just spent three months on the thing and cannot quite believe it is out. That feeling is real, and it is the only information the word carries.

Then time does what time does. The sticker stays on the fridge door. The menu is reprinted with the same flash on the same item. By the following summer the word new is the oldest thing in the room, and the customer standing in front of it is reading either a small lie or nothing at all. Mostly it is nothing, because the eye has learned to skip that word the way it skips a price tag it has already seen.

Even on the first day it did not answer the reader's only question, which is compared with what. New against the version they own. New against the one they were about to buy instead. New against the thing beside it on the shelf. The word points at a date, and the date belongs to the company.

So I take it out and write what changed. Thinner. Now in the sizes people kept asking for. Half the sugar. Baked in the same kitchen, delivered cold. Every one of those does the work the word was pretending to do, and none of them goes off.

A word that stops being true was telling you about the writer.