A Place Made Ready

The frost had come in the night and melted away by the hour the girl crossed the yard. Inside, she found Nyra already at the long shelf, a folded cloth in one hand. The two books rested in their place, spines even and settled. Beside them lay a run of bare wood, wiped free of dust, though it carried nothing at all.

The girl watched for a moment, then spoke. “Why do you tend that part? Nothing sits there. It holds no pages, no marks, nothing that could gather dust worth the wiping.”

Nyra ran the cloth once more along the wood before she answered. “A place kept clean is a place kept ready,” she said. “The books we have did not always exist. Once their run of wood was bare too, and no one yet knew what would come to fill it.”

She set the cloth down and rested a hand flat on the open stretch. “If a day comes when the work asks for another book, it should find room already made for it, and not have to push the others aside. Tending this part is how we promise that room to whoever needs it next.”

The girl looked at the wood a while longer, and it no longer seemed empty to her. It seemed patient, like a bed turned over in autumn and left ready for a seed not yet chosen. She took up a second cloth, and together they tended the place where nothing was written, keeping it ready for the book that had not yet asked to be born.