For the One Who Comes After

The evening work was done, and the girl sat by the lamp turning the book back past every page she knew, all the way to the front, where the hand that had written was not Nyra’s. It was thinner and more careful, an older keeper who had begun the book long before either of them knelt in this garden. The girl saw that the book had outlasted the one who started it, and that the words were still here when the hand that made them was not.

She looked up and asked why anyone kept such a book at all, when a keeper carried the whole garden in her head and never needed the page to recall a single bed. “You know every seed you have ever set,” the girl said. “So who is the writing for, if not for you?”

“Not for me,” Nyra answered, and set down her cup. “I write for the one who opens this book when I am not here to be asked. There will be a keeper after you, and one after her, and the garden will pass to hands I will never hold. The page is the only way my voice reaches that far.”

She turned the book gently back to the careful front hand. “This keeper is gone, and still she is telling me when her ground ran wet and when it held. That is a kind of company across all the years between us. I want to give the same to whoever comes and finds me only in these lines, so I set down what is true, and leave nothing dressed up to look wiser than it was.”

The girl looked at the old front hand, and then at the far blank pages waiting past where they had reached, and she understood that she was a reader now and would be a writer later, for someone she could not picture. She dipped the pen and added one plain honest line about the evening ground. “Then it is a long talk,” she said, “with people we never meet.” Nyra nodded, and did not need to add to it.