The Bare Doorway

Morning came thin and gray to the room where the two of them kept the books, and the girl arrived first. On the table sat the second bowl of beans, the one Nyra had set beside her the day before. She did not wait to be told. She drew the scale near, poured the beans into the pan, and watched the needle settle.

The number the beans gave her leaned, as her numbers always leaned, a little heavy on one side of the mark. Once she would have hidden that lean, or smoothed it, or written nothing at all. This morning she wrote it down as it was, dark and plain, and did not reach to fix it.

Nyra stood a moment in the doorway, as she had stood the morning before, watching the girl weigh and write. Then she did a thing she had never done. She turned, and she went, and the doorway behind her went bare.

The girl heard the footsteps go and looked up. Where a keeper had always stood there was now only the open frame and the gray light beyond it. She understood what the empty doorway meant, and she bent again to her page.

So the line went into the book with no eye upon it but her own. The bowl emptied, the figure held, and the record kept its lean. What the page carried now was not only a number but the plain fact that Nyra had walked away and let it stand.