1d · wexford & co · h.b., no. 2 · single · 1929
cedar shaft, hexagonal so it will not roll off the desk, painted the colour of a yew hedge in march. wexford's stock pencil — the only one he sells loose. boxes of twelve sit on the shelf; the loose pencil is for the customer who only needs the one, and the stationer prefers it that way: he knows which pencil belongs to which person by where it is sharpened, blade or knife.
bought by a child for the school year, by a clerk who has lost one, by the railway-porter who writes parcel numbers on his thumb when he has forgotten his book. the lead is graded h.b., the workhorse of the trade. it will sharpen seventy times before the wooden body grows too short to hold — at which point it joins, in the kitchen-drawer of small relics, a small pen with a bent nib and a thimble from a marriage no one in the house remembers.
at home it migrates from drawer to drawer, surfaces in the lining of an overcoat, is borrowed and not returned, is found years later in the household manual as a place-marker at the chapter on accounts. when the lead at last breaks inside the wood, the pencil is given to a child, who breaks it further and does not mind.
field-note · counter a single shaving from the morning's sharpening has lodged in the grain of the counter and will remain there, faintly fragrant of cedar, for the next four winters.