Soffit

Looking up from the garden path, the girl noticed that the underside of the eave was boarded and painted as neatly as any wall in the house, though no one ever stood below to admire it. She asked Nyra why anyone would finish a face that looked out only on the ground and the birds.

Nyra said that the board tucked under the eave was called a soffit, and that it closed in the open underside of the roof so that rain driven sideways could not reach the top of the wall, and so that swallows had a dry ledge to nest upon. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

She said a plain sentence has a soffit of its own. Under the few words that show, there is all the shaping done where no eye falls: the lines crossed out, the hours of weighing one word against another, the care given to a surface almost no one looks up to find.

The reader sees the clean overhang and walks on, dry, never guessing at the boarding tucked beneath it. That is as it should be, Nyra said. The work that keeps the rain off need not announce the labor that made it.

So the girl looked up more often after that, at eaves and at sentences alike, knowing the finished underside was there whether she saw it or not. The book keeps the eave, and you keep the boarding of it.