The Woman Who Came in for Ink

The day at Paperweight Stationery begins where everyone else's ends. At nine in the evening the owner raises the shutter, but only halfway. Raised full, he says, the shop looks too bright, and people walking past mistake it for daytime and wander in. Anyone with real business at a stationer's at night can duck a little on the way through the door.

Beside the till stands a desk. It was never stock; it was used long before it arrived here. Its corners are worn round, and in the upper right there is a valley pressed into the wood by somebody's ballpoint, years deep. The owner has never moved it. The chair is always pulled out a little, as if someone had only just stood up.

That night, twenty minutes before closing, a woman came in. She carried a large bag on her shoulder, too full to be an office bag, the corner of a cardboard box jutting out of it. It was the volume you get when you empty an eleven-year desk in a single day.

“Do you carry fountain pen ink?” she asked, though it was less a question than a confirmation. The tone of someone who had come because this seemed like the kind of place that would. Instead of answering, the owner opened the third shelf of the glass case.

There were five bottles. Black, black, blue, blue-black, and a green whose label had faded past reading. She looked at them for a long time. Longer than choosing a bottle of ink should take, but the owner did not hurry her. That is what closing time is for.

“It was my father's pen. I mean, he gave it to me,” she said, to a question nobody had asked. “When I got the job. I used it for a while, and then at some point I didn't. I took it out today and the ink had dried solid.” The pen came out of the bag. Its cap was covered in small scratches. Not the scratches of a thing unused, but of a thing carried around for years.

The owner picked up the blue-black. “The colour of night that hasn't fully drained,” he said. It was his first full sentence of the evening. It took her a moment to catch it, and when she did, she smiled for the first time.

The washing of the pen happened at the little tap beside the till. As the dried ink loosened in the water, an old blue came seeping out. Eleven years old, possibly. She watched it until the last of it was gone.

“You'll want to try it.” The owner nodded toward the desk. Then, instead of scrap paper for testing nibs, he set down a single sheet of letter paper. An old habit of the shop, apparently. Scratch paper for those who buy a pen; letter paper for those who buy ink.

She sat. The first line came easily. Dear Dad. At the second line the pen stayed still for a long time. The owner went out to lower the rest of the shutter, and somewhere inside the sound of it coming down she wrote the second line. I quit today.

After that it went quickly. That she had done well there. That she hadn't endured the job, she had simply gone to it, and those are different things. That she was only now taking the pen out again. Sentences that couldn't decide between apology and report filled the page. At the last line the pen stopped once more. It was the place to write that she would mail it, and that one sentence seemed to be the only one the ink refused.

“You don't have to send it.” The owner's second sentence. He pulled the desk drawer open to show her. Inside were letters. Standing on edge, lying flat, folded in half. Every one had a name on it. Not one had a stamp.

“Some people leave them here. When they need something between sending and throwing away.” She put her letter in an envelope and wrote her father's name where the address goes. No street, no number. For this drawer, a name was address enough.

At midnight she left with one bottle of ink. The letter stayed. The owner brought the shutter down and wrote something in the notebook by the till. The shop had sold exactly one bottle of ink that day, but the writing took him a little longer than that.

One by one the lights in the alley went out. The drawer grew heavier by one envelope. And on a desk in some apartment across the city, the ink waited for its cap to be opened. The colour of night that hasn't fully drained.