The Marks She Made for Herself

The girl was turning the older pages of the book when she stopped at a column she had passed a hundred times without a thought. Down the outer edge, beside some of the rows and not others, Nyra had set small quick strokes. A dot here. A short slash there. A single bare letter standing alone against a few. They were not words, and the girl had never once asked what they were for.

“What are all these little marks down the side?” the girl asked, laying her finger against the row of them. “You put them by some of the plantings and left the rest with nothing at all.”

Nyra leaned over to see where she pointed. “Those are my own marks,” she said. “The dot is for a seed I saved myself off the year before. The slash is for a row that came to nothing, so I would know not to trust that corner again. The letter is the field it came out of. I made them quick, in a hurry, so I would not have to stop and write a whole line every time.”

“But I could never have read them,” the girl said. “Not one of them, if you had not told me just now.” Nyra nodded slowly. “That is the trouble with a mark made for one reader,” she said. “It saves the hand that made it and shuts out every other. A book kept all in such marks would go quiet the day I did, and no one after me could open a word of it. The shorter I write, the less of it will outlast me.”

So Nyra took a clean page and set down the key to all of it, the dot and the slash and each bare letter spelled out in full, so that a stranger years off could hold the book and read even the corners she had once kept only for herself. The girl watched the quick marks turn back into plain words, and understood that a thing written short was written for now, and a thing written whole was written to be handed on.