papers, collected and engraved over years of me wondering.
All that time my father must have been whispering spells that hid each pen-stroke, word, and story. And the mechanism was, of course, voice-activated. The words would never sprout from the page. Because they would never again hear my father speak.
vi. I disobeyed my father.
I did not fell a tree.
I took some sheets of paper from the study and wrote over his imperceptible words with these ones. At night I grip that chunk of pulp tightly under my pillow and continue to wonder. With anger and a profound sadness I wonder why my father would spend his days cultivating paper on which to write his stories, then his nights writing his stories, but not in order to share them with his daughter.