If the Garden Asks

The two books stood together on the one shelf, the old one thick with years of weather and the new one lean with its rows of counts. Their spines had settled toward each other over the winter, as though they had agreed to lean. The girl looked at them a long while that evening, and past the second book she saw the bare wood where a third might one day rest.

She turned to Nyra, who was banking the fire for the night. “Will the garden ever ask us for a third book?” she said. The question had been sitting in her for days, since the two had first been given their one home.

Nyra set down the poker and considered the shelf with her. “A book begins only when the garden asks for one,” she said. “These two hold everything it asks of us now, the weather in the old and the counts in the new. Neither of them is waiting to be filled by a third.”

“Then how would we know,” the girl asked, “if it ever did ask?” She wanted a rule she could hold, some plain sign to watch for.

“You would find a thing the two of them could not hold,” Nyra said, “and your hand would reach for a page that was not there. That is how a book asks to begin. Until then, we keep these two, and we let the shelf keep its room.” The girl looked again at the bare wood, and for the first time it did not seem empty to her, only patient.