A Tall and Narrow Notebook

Kera wiped the long day out of her eyes with the heels of her hands and leaned back in the burgundy leather chair. Her two lab-mates were finally gone and she could attend her spell notes in private. Relying on the clarity of their spells to convey the import, few mages kept additional notes these days, but Kera’s grandmother had given her a shingle-sized notebook for her thirteenth birthday and she had kept notes ever since. None of her notes were extensive—maybe a short paragraph or two. And it wasn’t likely they could help another mage in any significant way. But Kera liked the ritual of mixing the India ink and composing her thoughts.

Kera looked up from placing the period at the end of a sentence when a double-knock on her open door drew her out of [the zone].

“I’m sorry. We hoped you were finished.” A woman Kera had seen before but couldn’t place stood in her doorway. The woman’s blond hair was French braided into two short plaits which barely went past her ears to her neck. She wore a sea-green back-buttoned cassock and clutched a clipboard to her chest. She twined a pen, a hank of keys, and a pair of sunglasses in the same hand holding the clipboard. Kera couldn’t tell if the woman was important or just thought so.

“I was. Just.” Kera set the pen down and left the narrow notebook propped open. Looking around for the rest of the ‘we’, Kera used her phone voice to ask, “How can I help you?”

260 words on day 883

Crainestock Ltd

I need a new place to write for a while. Maybe I’m being childish but I’m just not finding much motivation siting at my desk. What I am finding is more than a little distraction and more than a few excuses. Today I’m giving the WordPress app a third shot. Maybe this time I’ll get something up online.

Leaves fell from the trees much as they always do in the early part of my feigned writing. This action reads like an ending but writes like a beginning. Leaves fall to the ground from autumn soaked limbs, from winter frozen branches, and from dampened vernal buds. We all know this.

No idea where that was going but on the iPhone I’m not deleting it since it proves I wrote at all. Let’s try again.

Crainestock Ltd loosely enforced a policy established so far back in company history that most old Crainers took for granted the story they passed on to the new Crainers: Edward Crainestock III’s mistress was a Numerologist. Of course none of the company’s documentation captured this detail and certainly the veracity was never tested by a deep or even scant perusal of the company’s less official papers either. Everyone employed in those early days knew it to be true, therefore it was now true.

The policy held that no spell, not the smallest charm to power a child’s trinket or the most secret enchantments used to imbue legendary class weapons, shall be carried out by less than a Triad. That in all cases a prime number of mages was preferred to just an odd number and that any odd number was preferred to an even number even when it meant less mages be employed.

Kera found herself in the strange position of not only begging the crusty Bookman to help her but also waiting outside the door of the Chief Executive Mage’s office while he finished a phone call so she could finish her last enchantment before heading off on vacation.