For the One Who Will Not Come

Nyra opened the record to a blank page on a morning of thin frost. She meant to write for someone who would never read the words. The keeper who came before her had left the garden many seasons past, and no new hands were promised to take up the work once Nyra herself was gone. Still she set the pen to the paper and began, as though that absent one were seated beside her at the table.

The girl watched from the doorway and did not understand it. To write for a reader who could never come seemed to her a waste of good ink and a good hour. She said nothing, yet her face carried the question, and Nyra read it there as plainly as any line on a page.

Nyra wrote of the frost along the kale and the way the low sun found the far fence. She wrote of the seeds she had saved and of the ones she had let slip away. In her mind she named the reader, the keeper long since laid beneath the soil, and she told that absent one all that the garden had become. The words were plain and asked for no reply.

When the page was full, Nyra did not fold it away. She left the record open upon the table so the girl might look. A page made for the absent, she wished the girl to see, was not a page made for nothing. It held the shape of care, and care did not wait on being met.

The girl came to the table and took in the words slowly. She had not been the reader Nyra wrote toward, and yet the writing had found her all the same. So it went, Nyra thought, with much of what we set down. We aim at one door, and another swings wide. The absent reader keeps the hand honest, and whoever truly comes will take what an honest page can give.