The master's forgotten item - February 22, 2011

It was the fate of a pen that brought them together.
Or wether it was the pen Kate stopped over, or that she was carrying five thick Stephen King Novels too many on her way out the library. Possibly it was Kate's scroungyness to cling to possessions which often got lost. The leading factor was yet still unknown.
But Jade was there. Jade. At that time she hadn't even known his name, a fact laughable now but still the dearest truth.
"Is this yours?" He interupted with questioning eyes her inward thoughts.
They went on at a length, and what a curious thing that at the end of the conversation the pen would be dropped again, forgotten. It would be wearing cool pebbles of rain as they dripp-dripped down over it's black smudgy surface.
Alas, but a man would pick it up, touching his light gray beard to tell the woman behind him he had remembered to bring the pen for their grocery list later that evening. So lucky was he that he just so happened to find a pen waiting on him, dyed from the rain to plastic gray like a wolf's coat.
But the old man, like all old men, had been set firmly in his ways. And it was his way to drop the pen at a store beside juicey ripe tomatoes that grinned freshly. He abandoned it. Sadly he would think no more of the extra pen as it rolled on the floor there tossed about by giant stinky shoes so varying it didn't know what to expect.
Until, perchance, one wholesome week later a trouble-making child on roller-skates threw herself across the store and knocked over a barrel-amount of rolling tomates which coated the throughly miserable gray pen in acid-slime. It was not to be washed off for seven-weeks later. The manager saw simply a bubble of protruding tomato imprinted in the shape of a shoe. He grasped this winceingly and tossed the pin and un-eddible tomato in the trash. There it made it's way to a garbage metal container for the garbageman to pick up and deliver to the dump.
But one of the workers was being unreasonable that day and the bag containing the pen on it's topmost stinky layer remained untied. All that was needed was a slight bump of overspeed and the pen was jarred from it's home and deposited on the street, where it rolled downhill to a sidewalk to that very same library.
And the girl stopped her boyfriend who was walking to the library and holding her hand to pick up Springs Of Tide.
She stopped him and released his hand to pick up that old faithful fateful pen. She had no way of knowing it was the same pen. But she was a saver of old and dingy but useful items. So she dusted it off (what remained of the tomato that had steadily dried to crumbling dust) and placed it in her pocket.
There it stayed in a relieved sort of way, I can imagine, in the girls pocket who took but sparing awareness of it. And slowly it's ink was suckered out the point until what but remained a shell.
With finalty it was tossed in the trash again to make it's second adventure to the garbage heap, where there would be no stops in between.

- Pinquill girl