A Row of Handles

The girl opened her book that evening not to write in it but to read back through it. She turned past the fresh pages to a season already gone, to a line she had set down in the summer, and she read it slowly, the way one reads a thing one has half forgotten having written.

The line was short. It said only that the plums had come in and that they had picked until the light went out of the sky. But as she read it the whole of that day rose up behind the words, the ache that had settled between her shoulders, the warm smell of the fruit where it split open in the grass, the particular yellow the air had turned at the very end. None of that stood on the page. The page held the fact of the picking and no more.

She sat with this a while. What she had feared losing that summer, the plain report of the day, was the one part she had troubled herself to keep. Everything larger she had let go of without meaning to, and it had not gone from her. It had stayed, entire, behind the little line, like a room standing full behind a door she had not opened in months.

Nyra came through the room on some errand of her own and passed out the far side, and the girl did not lift her eyes from the page. She turned to another entry from another week and found the same thing true of it. The words were a handle and nothing more, and what they raised when she took hold of them was far heavier and far fuller than they were.

She closed the book and rested her hand flat on the cover. It came to her then that the book was not a store of her days at all but a row of handles for days she was carrying anyway, had carried all along and scarcely felt the carrying at all. She wrote nothing more that evening. The keeping, she understood, had been done long before, without her watching, in her, and the page had only ever kept the place.