Refuse

6

She slipped her penknife carefully under the paper in the very corner of the frame. Slowly she eased the paper away from the mold and then, holding it up, she examined it in the light. The small, colored hairs and fibers stood out starkly against the eggshell colored sheet. One of the realities of homemade silo paper is that every sheet was unique. The paper itself took time and industry, and each leaf bore the signature of artistry and care. Leah removed a dozen sheets from a homemade press, and replaced them with the new sheet that she’d just removed from the frame, along with a handful of other sheets from the others that waited to be pressed.

The makeshift paper press was a brilliant feat of engineering, and it hid in plain sight disguised as a metal shelf unit. Each individual shelf within the unit was almost invisibly made up of two separate sheets of thin metal. Beneath the flange on each shelf, there was a hidden set of wing nuts that could be turned in order to press the paper.

She twisted each of the wing nuts to tighten up the press, and then pushed the whole unit back into place so that—without some prior knowledge—no one would know that the shelf was actually a device used to manufacture illegal paper.

Leah heard humming, and as she evened up the dozen sheets of new and finished paper in her hands, she turned to see that Ivan was kicked back in his chair, humming to himself and chewing slowly. His eyes were closed and she could tell that he was writing something in his mind—working out a turn of phrase, or maybe a description of something that had yet to come into existence. The other four members of the guild: Randall Paine, the sweeper and his wife Louise (Louise worked as a picker in the recycling unit up on 48); Mark Durant the farmer; and William Burke the porter—all were taking a break, sipping tea and discussing their latest writings.

She smiled as she looked at Ivan, and at that moment he opened his eyes and returned the smile. He always had a smile for her, and he never pressured her to reveal what she was working on. He trusted that she would tell him about it whenever the time was right.

As she walked back towards the table, Ivan bent over and spit into the frame, working and smoothing the pulp with the flat end of a comb until it was just the way he wanted it. She always admired the care and intense concern that he always took with his work. The moment seemed poetic and beautiful to her, but then it is often true that when life is at its most poetic, the whole of it can turn on a dime. He’d just started to hum again when the door flew open and standing there in the open door, Leah could see Sheriff Tatum and the Mayor of the silo.