The Strip Beside the Column

The page for the third bean planting kept a wide blank strip along its edge, left so by chance the spring the ruled column ran too narrow. No hand meant the space for anything. It stood beside the entry the way a border of ground at a wall stands unplanted, there but unclaimed.

A blank so near the working hand does not stay bare for long. Over the seasons small marks crept into it, and none of them belonged to the bean planting at all. A tally of eggs from one hard week. A lone figure for the depth of a late snow. The faint brown ghost of a thumb that had lately held a wet root.

Nyra planned none of it. Each mark had simply found the nearest open space at some hurried hour, and the strip happened to be nearest. So it filled the way a fence corner fills with blown leaves, not by any design but by being the place stray things come to rest.

Years on, the girl saw she could read the strip as a record of its own. It held no one season but a scatter of them, a dozen unrelated days pressed shoulder to shoulder, every one of them a stranger to the bean row the page was written to keep.

The page carried the fact it was made for, and no more. The strip beside it carried twenty, and carried them only because no hand had ever ruled that it should. Nyra let it stand exactly so, a record that gathered itself while everyone looked elsewhere.