One of many Unending Notebooks: A little book

The little fairy gently guided the needle through the final hole of the spine of the book. With a gentle tug she tensed the string binding and tied the start and end of the string together, completing the little one inch tall notebook. The fairy looked out of the window beside her; rain thrashed down hard outside, though it was too dark to see: one only heard.

A gentle voice called out from the other side of the room, “Lazing about? It’s raining out there so there is no excuse not to--”

The old voice, now illuminated by the same little candle the fairy had been working under, looked to the fairy clutching the small notebook in her arms.

“I finished it just now,” the little fairy said with a smile, “I don’t know why you couldn’t do it for me though. I’ve seen you work, it would have taken you just a few minutes with your experience in bookmaking and...”

The fairy gently ran her fingers down a scar on her face that centered on her right eye, an eye that no longer functioned; in that moment the hours that preceded came flashing into her mind all at once. To remember her hand fumbling to try and get the needle into the right position with such little sense of depth: wounded.

“All the more reason you learn how to make the book yourself,” the old lady said, gently prying the little notebook away from the fairy to inspect it, “from now on you can make your own books, you’ve regained a little of your ability to judge depth even if you can’t see it. And between you and me,” the lady looked around the room as though there would be someone to overhear their discussion. There stood no one, almost all other residents of their little town currently a short ways from the coast wishing they were back on land already.

“Between you and me,” the old lady continued again, “the string is mystical.”

“Mystical?”

“Yes...mystical,” the old lady waved her hand into the air as though to call out a specter of mystery. It only took one good eye for the fairy to see the crazy in the old lady’s two eyes, “It reacts to the wishes of the bookmaker, and only for the bookmaker does the string affect the book that was made.”

“What kind of effect?” The fairy asked, unconvinced of the third reason she had to make her notebook on her own.

“Who knows? What do you seek?”

“To understand,” the fairy said; there was no hesitation in her speech, but in afterthought the hesitation of accepting what she said was intense.

“To understand what?” The old lady asked, always amused by the moments the little fairy’s mouth outran her brain.

“I don’t know. Everything I guess.”

“Hmm,” the old lady let out a sigh, not fond of the fairy’s answer, “Well, I suppose then this little book will help you figure that out.”

The old lady set the book gently back into the fairy’s hands and walked back to the rocking chair she had been sitting in.

Defeated in battle against the old lady’s superstitious string, the fairy sat down against the window frame with her new notebook and looked it over with pride. A rich purple covered the outside of the notebook in a rough, leathery texture. The old lady had made sure it was a strong material, to the point that out of fear the fairy might hurt herself, the old lady went ahead and pressed the holes into the cover for her.

Slowly the fairy thumbed through page after page. Page after page. Page after page...

She stopped.

“How many pages were in this notebook?” The fairy asked, staring at a blank two-page spread.

“Well it was only one sheet of paper, but cut up small I figure you have about sixty-four.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s just an estimate. Do you think you are gonna run out of paper that fast?”

The fairy started leafing through the pages again from the front, counting quickly.

“Two, four, twelve...thirty-four...fifty-two...sixty-four...seventy-eight...ninety-two...one-hundred--”

“There isn’t any way you have more than eighty pages there.”

“But it keeps going, I’m up to one-hundred-twenty-eight now.”

“The string,” the old lady said with a quick clap.

The fairy looked up to the old lady with surprise. Yet she knew the old lady only told half-truths and stretched the reality of things; she never lied.

In the fairy’s hands was a notebook whose pages would never run out.