The Margin-Scribe

The reason the Atlas has an edge. Something shaped almost like a cartographer sits at the rim of the written world and un-writes it one line at a time; you never see more of it than the hand and the pen, and the page is emptier where it has been. It keeps your ledger too: every grain of dust you bank, the pen prices through you, and every course of stone you raise, the nib un-writes line by line: what you build, it strikes from the record. And now and then it reaches further forward — the stroke you had planned, it un-writes before your arm can finish it. What you meant to do was never written — and the omens you have sealed against a later hour are only marginalia to the pen: when it strikes, it blots them from the page before they can come true. What it has written of itself it can read back: given a breath it re-inks its own margins and the wounds close.