The Honest Gap

The girl found the wound in the old book on a gray afternoon, a ragged edge where a whole page had once been. Nyra leaned close and saw the stub of paper still caught in the spine, torn away long before either of them had begun to keep it. Between the entry for one autumn and the entry for the next spring there was now only that ragged edge and a gap where a season should have spoken.

She ran her thumb along the rough edge and looked up. “Someone tore it out,” she said. “What did it say? Can we not put it back the way it was?” She had a good hand now, and Nyra could see her already wanting to mend the gap, to write a spring into the empty place so the years would run smooth again.

Nyra shook her head. “We do not know what it said,” she told her. “Neither of us was here to see that spring, and the hand that kept it is gone. If I wrote a season into that place now, I would only be guessing, and a guess dressed as a record is a small lie that a reader would trust.” She closed the cover a moment and opened it again to the ragged edge. “Better an honest gap than a smooth falsehood.”

So they did a smaller thing instead. Beside the ragged edge Nyra wrote the date as near as she could reckon it, and under it a plain note: a page was lost here, torn out before our keeping, its season unknown. The girl added her own hand beneath, saying only that the two of them had found the gap and chosen to leave it open rather than fill it with invention.

When they set the book down, the gap was still a gap, but it no longer looked like a wound. A reader who came after them would find no false spring there, only two honest hands admitting what they could not know. Nyra thought that a record which could hold its own losses without hiding them was worth more than one that pretended to be whole, and she left the ragged edge unmended, plain and true.