Thanks for the heads up re. the book (who's "we" by the way?). My mom gave it to my Dad for his birthday, and both of them have been telling me I should read it. This gives me extra motivation. Oh, I'm not so sure that I'm ready to be an assassin, but I have written a prose poem in dedication to y'all it follows. Hope it makes you smile!
Lots of Love,
John
Everything Partly
There were rumors of magic when we first moved into this classroom. Not outright statements, murmurs, echoes fading away long after the initial sound is forgotten.
And how could we believe our ears? A pencil sharpener? Especially not this one. It ate pencils. Ground them down to the eraser without ever producing a sharpened tip.
Some of us resorted to experimentation, tried colored pencils, crayons, even a Sharpie. But all that just gummed up the works and we found ourselves in the ironic position of taking it apart and cleaning it, even though we knew it wouldn't work anyway.
Anger, jokes and cynicism were next. One day we came to class to find a fake finger sticking out of the sharpening hole, catsup dripping down the side. Another time we found four gaping wounds—stigmata—where it had been wrenched from the wall.
We supposed it was the night janitor who retrieved it from beneath the bookshelf on the far side of the room, puttied up the holes and screwed it back in.
After that we kind of made our peace with it. A bouquet of forget-me-nots appeared in the hole where the finger had been, and we figured out that a blunt pencil tip fills in the bubbles on standardized tests faster than a sharpened one. More surface area.
There was a final joke, though. The oldest one in the book. You know, the one in which somebody opens the sharpener's dust catcher just a crack so that when the handle is turned it falls and pencil filings and graphite end up all over the floor.
We were taking the last test of the year and our futures hung heavy in the air above us. One of us got up, approached the sharpener—a few easily distracted heads turned. The pencil was inserted and the handle was cranked—more heads followed. By the time the dust catcher opened, fell and bounced on the floor, everyone was watching.
Curled filings and graphite sparkling in the fluorescent light jounced out of the box and began to rise like a dandelion cloud without its stem. Tests forgotten, we watched the glittering ball spread out, widen across the room: around, above and below. And our eyes, pinpricked with surprise, milk-dotted with light joined in, echoing with the diamond cut glow of unity.
There isn't much to tell after that. We all passed that test, and we moved classrooms soon after, many of us going our separate ways. When we pass each other in the halls, though, or when we're outside on clear nights, our eyes can't help going back home to that many-speckled now in which everything partly is whole.
