short fiction · 2026-11-02

The First Crooked Stroke

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Brother Aldric's fingers knew the weight of every quill, the precise angle where ink met vellum without bleeding. Forty years. Forty years of Augustine, of Jerome, of Gregory the Great — each letter a mirror of the exemplar, each line a discipline that had straightened his spine and stilled his breath. The scriptorium smelled of oak gall and candle wax, and the only sound was the scratch of forty quills moving as one.

He had never written a word of his own. Not a prayer in the margin, not a name on the flyleaf. The rule was absolute: the scribe disappears into the text.

Then, one winter morning, copying the Confessions, his hand trembled. Not from age — from something else. The word inquietum — restless — and his quill pressed too hard, the downstroke thickening, the curve of the q pulling left instead of right. A crooked letter. A flaw.

The prior would have scraped it clean. But Aldric stared at that single deviation, the ink still wet, and felt something unfurl in his chest that no exemplar had ever named.

He wrote beneath it, in a hand that shook: I have copied this word a thousand times. Today I felt it.

The prior found him there at vespers, the page still open. He read the line. He read the words beneath. He said nothing. But the next morning, Aldric's exemplar was blank vellum.