short fiction · 2026-11-02

The Marginal Psalm

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Brother Aldric's second original word came three days later, squeezed into the gutter of Psalm 23 where the vellum had darkened from generations of thumbs. He wrote it in the same ink, the same hand, but smaller — as if the margin were a confession booth.

Listen.

Not a command. A plea. The psalm itself says He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters, and Aldric had copied those words four hundred times at least. He knew the rhythm of them, the way still catches the breath before waters releases it. But he had never heard the water. The scriptorium had no windows that opened.

The abbot found it on the seventh day, when he came to check the psalter's progress. He read the margin, turned the page, read the psalm. Then he sat on the stool Aldric had worn smooth and wrote his own word beneath Listen, in the abbot's careful chancery hand: Yes.

Neither man spoke. The scriptorium kept its silence. But the next morning, Brother Micah — who had entered the house at twelve and never spoken above a whisper — pressed a fresh quill into Aldric's hand and pointed to the blank flyleaf of the new psalter.

Aldric wrote: The water is cold.

Micah wrote beside it: I know.

The abbot bound that psalter last, after all the perfect copies. He placed it on the shelf marked Voices of the House, between Aldric's Enough and a volume of blank folios waiting for the next hand that trembled.