The First Blank Book

The new book was the palest thing in the room, its pages so clean they seemed to hold their breath. Nyra set it in the girl’s hands and stepped back to the window, letting her have the weight of it. For a long while the girl only turned it over, feeling the smooth uncut edges, unwilling to be the one who marked it first.

“You are afraid of it,” Nyra said, not turning from the glass. “So was I, with my first one. A book with nothing in it is a kind of dare.”

“What if the first thing I write is the wrong thing?” the girl asked. Nyra smiled toward the garden. “Then it will be the first thing, and honest enough. The book does not ask you to be right. It only asks you to begin.”

“Every book I keep started the same way,” Nyra went on, “with one small line I was almost sorry to make. Now I cannot tell you which line came first, only that the page needed it before it could hold anything else.”

So the girl opened to the first page and set down a single word, small and plain, the name of the day. The bareness broke, and the book was hers now, no longer a dare but a beginning. Nyra came back from the window and did not lean over to see what she had written.