What the Pipe Kept Aiming At

Someone drew a pipe to the edge of a sheet and meant the next sheet to catch it. For a while the next sheet did.

Then a binder in the mid-to-late fourteen hundreds took the stack of Christmas cards and nested them the usual way, one fold inside another, and the pipe went into a gutter that faced the wrong neighbour. It has been facing the wrong neighbour ever since.

The words we still can't say. Five hands, maybe, on parchment from between fourteen-oh-four and thirty-eight, and nothing in them has opened. But the drawing never needed opening. It knew its neighbour the way a hinge knows the door, and kept knowing it across five hundred years of the wrong page.

Whoever did the nesting is not the villain. Davis says the unbound ones mostly didn't last. The scramble was the keeping. So we have two books under one cover: the binder's book, which is the one we hold, and the stack the scribes passed around, which is the one the pipes still remember.

Nobody has read either. One of them, at least, still points.