The Brim

Nyra held the watering can under the pump and worked the handle until the water rose and trembled at the brim, a bright skin of it standing a little above the rim before it would spill. She stopped there, at the exact edge of what the can could hold, and let the last of the motion settle. The brim was an honest line. It said this much and no more, and it said it without apology.

She thought, as she often did, that a vessel told the truth about itself at the brim. A thing that is empty makes no promises and a thing that is overfull breaks them, but a thing filled level to the brim holds precisely what it was made to hold. There was a plainness in that she had come to trust, the way she trusted the weight of a full can against the pull of her arm.

A book had a brim as well, though it was harder to see. It was the last line of the last page, the white margin past the final word, the place where the telling simply stopped. A book could hold only so many pages, and the pages only so many words, and the words only so much of all that a person might wish to set down. Every book was filled to its brim and then closed.

And yet what the book could not hold was not therefore lost. It brimmed over, the way the water would have, into the one who read it. The things a page had no room for went on in the reader instead, in the slow garden of remembering, where a single sentence could keep on growing long after the covers had come together. The brim of the book was only the beginning of the brim of the reader.

So Nyra carried the can level across the yard, watching the trembling surface and spilling none of it, and she thought that the fullest things were always the ones that asked to be carried with the most care. A book left open on the sill, a can filled to its edge, a mind brought close to the limit of what it could keep. She tipped the water at last into the dark soil of the bed, and the brim came down, and the ground took what the can had carried to the very edge of losing.