Phil W. Bayles

A Short Story About Ink and Paper.

God, I miss fountain pens.

I used to have the most beautiful fountain pen in my study at home, made by a local craftsman from a piece of yew wood. I adored that pen. The weight of it in my hand; the sound of the nib scratching on paper; the way the ink used to glisten for just a moment on the page before it dried.

Maybe its still there, gathering dust in its little black box on my desk.

I’m writing this with a chicken feather I found in the coop the other day. Judging by the colour I think it’s one of Emily’s. Anne is all black, so it can’t be hers, and Charlotte doesn’t have the same brown speckles.

Turning it into a quill was harder than I thought. After half an hour trying to cut a slit into the end I realised it was too flexible, so I stuck it into the fire to try and harden it. The tip’s a little singed now, but it got the job done.

Ink was much easier. All I needed was grass and rainwater, and I have an inexhaustible supply of those. Good thing, too; yesterday the last of the biros ran out, and the only pencil I could find was little more than a nub with an eraser on the end. Why didn’t I buy more when I had the chance?

The problem is paper. These are the very last pages of my very last notebook, cobbled together from whatever random scraps I could find lying around the cottage. I don’t have the first idea of how to make more, and even if I did I would probably have to recycle some of my other writing. Words are a finite resource these days; removing them from the world would be a crime, even if they are the random scribblings of a hermit.

There’s no alternative. I have to go back to the mainland.

I know that it’s lunacy: risking my life for a few measly sheets of paper. I have shelter on this little island. I can grow crops, and collect rainwater. I could survive here for years on my own.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Survive. Not live.

The whole reason I came here, before everything went to hell, was to write. I abandoned the novel months ago — there’s no market for it now, anyway — but I kept on writing. It’s been like an anchor; keeping me connected to the way things used to be. Making me feel more human.

If I give it up now, I’m no different from those things hear, howling and shrieking across the water every night.

They were human once, too.

A little while ago my friend Andrew set me an impromptu writing challenge: to write a short story as a diary entry. This one was inspired by the “morning pages” which I’ve been writing for more than eight months now. I came up with the pun first, as is so often my way, and basically went from there.