The Agate

The girl carried in a flat stone, gray and banded, worn smooth by some river that Nyra had never seen. An agate, Nyra told her, laying it in the light. Not for planting, and not for the kitchen, but for the quiet work of making a surface lie down and shine.

Nyra set a sheet of paper on the board and drew the cold stone across the gilded edge in slow strokes, again and again, until the dull leaf began to answer the lamp. The agate asked for patience and for a steady hand, and it gave back a low warm gleam that no brush could coax from the gold.

It added nothing, the girl saw. It took nothing away. The grain of the leaf stayed what it was beneath the shine, only pressed closer to the truth of itself, only made to hold the light it already carried.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The gleam on the edge would not survive in any entry, and the slow sound of stone on gold would not either, and the warmth of the lamp on two bent heads was a thing for the evening and not for the page.

So Nyra wrote only that the edges were burnished and the year was closing in, and let the rest stand in the room where it had happened. The book keeps the count, and you keep the shine of it.