What the Margin Kept

The girl sat at the table with the old book open before her, a pen held above the wide edge of a page. Nyra had written that page in a spring long gone, in her own even hand. Now beside those lines the girl was setting down a few words of her own, small and careful, out at the margin where the paper stayed bare.

Nyra came to stand behind her and read what the two hands had made together. “You have found the margin,” she said. “I left it open all these years and did not know why. Now I can see it was only waiting for a second hand.”

She turned back through the pages, and in more than one place the girl’s notes now stood beside her own. Here a name for a plant she had only drawn. There a date the older line had let pass. The margin held what the middle of the page had missed.

“When I am gone from this work,” Nyra said, “the book will still carry two of us. My line and yours, running down the one page. Whoever reads it after will know the record was never the keeping of a single hand.”

The girl dipped the pen again and wrote on, out at the edge where the paper was clean. Nyra did not tell her what to set there. That was the whole gift of the margin: it belonged to the one who came after, and she was free to fill it however the day asked of her.