The Paste Brush

The girl found the wide flat brush on the high shelf, its pale bristles gone stiff with paste from some evening neither of them could name. “What is this one for?” she asked, turning it in the lamplight. “That is the paste brush,” Nyra said, and she set the little pot on the stove to soften what the days had hardened.

When the paste had gone smooth and warm, Nyra drew the brush across the back of a loose leaf, working from the center out to the edges so that no air would be trapped beneath. “Lay it down slowly,” she said, “and let it take.” The girl pressed the pasted leaf to its neighbor, and the two sheets drank at each other until they were one.

“You cannot see it once it is done,” the girl said, running her thumb along the seam. “No,” Nyra answered. “The paste gives all of itself to the joining and keeps nothing back for show. It asks only to be spread thin and even, and then to vanish into the hold it makes.”

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The warm smell of the paste would not survive in any entry, and the faint tack beneath two pressed palms would not either, and the quiet of a leaf learning to belong was a thing for the evening and not for the page.

So Nyra wrote only that the loose leaves were mended back into the whole, and let the rest stay in the room where it had happened. The book keeps the entry, and you keep the tack of it.