The Pen Wears, the Page Keeps

The charcoal stick had grown short. Nyra had begun the season with a length she could hold in a whole fist, and now it was a stub she pinched between two fingers. Every line in the book that spring had come from it, and every line had made it smaller. The girl watched the last of it darken a row of beans onto the page.

When the stub was gone, Nyra took a new one from the jar on the shelf. It was long and clean and cold, and it made a bolder mark than the worn one had. On the same page the two kinds of line sat together, the faint gray of the old stub above and the dark of the new below, and anyone could see where one tool had ended and the next begun.

The girl turned back through the older pages and found the same story told over and over. Here a thin dry line, there a thick wet one, here a mark so faint it had almost given up. Each change of hand was a change of pen, and the book had held them all without minding. The tools had come and gone by the dozen. The book stayed.

Nyra said nothing of this, but she let the girl keep turning. The pens were used up and thrown to the fire or lost in the soil of the far row. Not one of them had lasted a single year. The book on the table had seen more springs than the girl had, and it would see more still.

That evening the girl chose a fresh stub for herself and made her first mark of the season in her own small book. It was bold and dark, the mark of a new tool. She understood now that it too would wear thin before the beans were picked, and that some later pen would carry on the row she had begun. The pen was hers for a while. The book would belong to whoever kept turning it.