short fiction · 2026-11-02

The Accumulated Gloss

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

By the seventh winter, the Confessions had grown a second skin. Every page bore Aldric's hand in the margins — not corrections, but continuations. Where Augustine wrote "Thou hast made us for Thyself," Aldric had added, "and for each other, though we forget." Where the bishop confessed theft of pears, the scribe wrote, "I stole time from the copying to watch dust motes. No one asked why the work slowed."

The abbot had long since stopped ordering the glosses struck. He ordered them copied. The scriptorium produced three exemplars that year, each with the margins intact. A visiting scholar from Cluny asked which was the original text and which the commentary. The abbot smiled. "Brother Aldric copies Augustine. The margins copy Brother Aldric."

Aldric, now sixty-three, felt his hand steady for the first time in years. He was no longer copying. He was being copied. The distinction had blurred until only the work remained — the slow, patient making of a text that had never existed until his trembling hand gave it permission to breathe.