The Press

The girl brought a handful of violets to the long table, where the heavy book lay open and waiting. “Will they keep,” she asked, “if we press them here between the pages?”

“They will keep their shape,” Nyra said, laying each flower flat against the paper. “The press holds the form of a thing, the way a leaf lies, the turn of a petal. That much a book can save for you.”

“But not the color?” The girl touched one bruised purple edge, already going pale at the rim where the light had found it.

“Not the color, and not the smell of the morning they grew in,” Nyra said. “The press takes the water out, and the water was half of what they were. What you close in the book is the memory of a violet, not the violet itself.”

She closed the cover slowly, and set a stone on top to hold the weight. “Come back in a week,” Nyra said, “and you will have something true and something lost, both at once. That is what a press is for, and that is all a book can do.”