Calligraphist

From her perch on the windowsill behind her mothers desk, it seemed to Laura that the desk was no more than a flood of papers. It had been overrun by empty note cards, onto which her mother was carefully crafting the words You're Invited. A stack began to grow in the corner of the desk beside the pens. Laura slowly cocked her head to match the growing lopsidedness. Blank note cards splattered one side and cream-colored note cards, broken by a splash of black letters, were piling on the other.

The feather in her mothers hand twisted and turned the same way every time. Lagging downwards and to the left, curving upwards to form an intricate y. Then pausing for a breath before heading down again to spell out the word invited with quick, jittery movements. Laura loved watching her mother work with that brown lined feather pen. She liked to keep track of how many times her mother dipped the silver tip into the black ink, just so that she could record it in her journal at the end of the day. The numbers that her journal held had no use, but it was a habit that Laura had developed and refused to break no matter how much her father prodded.

It is a waste of time, he would say. Laura would agree, then return to her mothers study to count the number of times she dipped her pen. Laura was sure that her father was jealous. He wanted Laura to be like him, a woodcutter. He wanted her to have an eye for form, for the rings in the logs that would be the base of her life, but she had other habits. She liked to watch her mother dip her feathered pen.

Laura discovered a bag in a store once while shopping with her father. A bag full of multicolored feathers.

“Daddy, please will you buy it for me?” she asked, her eyes wide and begging.

“That's a waste of money,” he replied with bitter, downcast eyes. Her pleading and prodding persisted until he finally conceded.

Laura snuck into her mothers study late that night and stole a container of ink. In her room down the hall, Laura ripped open the bag of feathers, sending them spiraling onto her rug. There was a flickering shine in her eyes, one that brightened as she lifted one of the feathers, a purple one with teal spots. A thin piece of tan paper sat on her desk, close to the bottle of ink she had stolen.

Dipping the plastic feather into the ink she tried to write the letter y, as she had seen her mother do so many times. Her wrist movements mirrored her mothers, but the plastic feather lost the ink, smearing it across the paper as its rough edge ripped the paper in half. Laura tried a second time and a third, before angrily splattering the ink across the paper and her desk. It dripped onto her nightgown but she did not count how many times it dripped. Instead she sat staring at the rings of the mahogany desk through the spilled ink. She counted how many rings there were and recorded them on the next page in her diary.