The Flyleaf

Near the front of every finished book Nyra left one page that carried nothing at all. The apprentice had noticed it for weeks, the blank leaf that came after the cover and before the first true page, and she had decided at last that it must be a mistake, a sheet the binder had forgotten to use. So one grey afternoon, with the garden shut under a low sky, she brought the question to the long table where Nyra sat mending a spine.

Nyra did not answer in words right away. She finished the stitch she was pulling, tied it off, and then laid the book open to that empty page so the two of them could look at it together in the thin light. The paper was a little heavier than the pages that followed, smooth and pale and entirely unmarked, and it seemed to the apprentice to be waiting for something she could not name.

This is the flyleaf, Nyra told her, and it is not a mistake and it was never meant to be filled. Every book needs a breath before it begins, a small quiet room between the door of the cover and the first room of the story. Without it the words would start too soon, before the reader had set down the weight of the day, and the first sentence would be half heard, like a greeting spoken while a person is still taking off a wet coat at the threshold.

The apprentice ran one finger across the blank leaf and understood that its emptiness was the whole of its work. A full page could be read and a full page could be weighed, but this page asked to be passed through slowly, the way the garden gate is passed through on the walk up to the door. It held no date and no name and no account of any single day, and yet it held the pause in which all of those things could be made ready to be received.

When they closed the book and set it on the finished shelf, the apprentice no longer saw the flyleaf as a waste of good paper. She saw it instead as the quiet that makes a first word audible, the still moment the keeper leaves on purpose so that the story has somewhere to be welcomed. Nyra watched her face and knew that the lesson had taken, and she reached for the next book in the pile that needed mending.