Instalment One Hundred and Ten

Click to embiggen

The pen, the pen was the thing. She had never been able to write before she came across that pen. She knew how to write, of course, but she couldn’t write like she could when she held that pen. A pen that came at a cost. 

She and that pen, they told some stories, classics, the pen bringing them from her. And those stories brought her the world.

They would turn, in turn, a dull line to sparkling verse, polish a cliché to a gem, a groan to a laugh.

Soon it became hard to tell if she was scratching the nib across the page or if the pen was leading her hand. 

Ashamed, she only communicated in writing, finding her own tongue too clumsy and coarse, but on paper she soared.

Still she kept on writing, the pen wicking her wit, spilling her across the page for all to see in blood red ink. 

Her tongue withered to mute, she worked through writer’s cramp, hunger and sleep, until there was no more left to say. Her ink had dried. Used up by her pen and public, she died.
 
I found this pen, in her hand. It hasn’t left mine.