squat clear glass, the ink inside the deep blue of a sky just before the first word of evening. the bottle is built for the angle of dipping — the inner well sloped, the last drop never quite out of reach. the screw cap is black bakelite, the thread a stubborn quarter-turn loose. fingerprints on the shoulder from anyone who has ever used it.
the paper label has a navy bar across the top. Parker Quink runs through the centre in a slow italic, slightly off-axis from the printer's stone. underneath, royal blue · solv-x in small-caps; the patented quick-drying solvent the colour-name no longer needs. the volume in fluid ounces. below that, smaller, the country.
used by the writer of letters that take a week to begin. one nib full per sentence; the third sentence is where the blue starts to look like a thought. the dried ink on the pen-tray makes a small constellation no one has bothered to wipe; a country with three rivers and no name.
spilt on the cuff it goes to the laundry as grey, comes back as a faint memory of a sentence the wearer has since forgotten writing.
on the same desk: the carpenter's glue, the quinine, and at the elbow always the open letter and the slow silence of writing.