The Leaf Itself

There was a leaf that Nyra could not have set down in words. Its edges ran in a fine repeating scallop, and each small tooth along the margin turned at an angle no line of ink would ever catch. She had tried once, long ago, and the sentence she wrote came out flat and wrong, a shape that any of a dozen plants might wear.

So this morning she did the thing her own teacher had shown her. She laid the leaf flat between two clean pages, smoothing it with the side of one finger until every tooth lay open and true. She weighted the book with a stone and left it to hold the shape in the dark, close and quiet, for as long as the drying would take.

The girl looked on and made no sound. She saw that this was not writing at all, and yet it was a kind of record, truer than any line Nyra might have drawn. The page would not tell you the name of the leaf, nor the day it was gathered, but it would hold the leaf, the real and particular leaf, long after the plant that bore it had gone brown in the row.

After a while the girl chose a leaf of her own, a smaller one from the low herb by the gate. She pressed it as she had seen Nyra press hers, unsure at first, then patient, smoothing until the small veins showed like a map of thin gray roads. She set it in the back of her own book and laid her palm on the cover to keep it.

Neither of them spoke. There are shapes the hand cannot honestly copy and the tongue cannot honestly name, and for these the book must simply open and take the thing in, whole and flat and silent. Nyra pressed her stone a little firmer on the older page, and the two books sat side by side, each holding a leaf that no word would ever have to stand in for.