by Michael St John
What dreams flicker in the mind of your yellow pencil, perched proudly in that old coffee mug on your desk—lead sharpened to a fierce point, awaiting your hand for the next sketch? Perhaps it wanders toward its youth in a sun-dappled Californian incense-cedar forest, air thick with the scent of resin and brimming with ambition, longing for the hereditary yellow coat of its ancestors, a mark of regal quality and luxury. Gender? Pure linguistic fantasy—most chose male—but the hardness of the lead was the call of fate, among 22 degrees: unyielding for technical projects, velvety-dark for artists, or fine and precise. Yet Pencil longed for HB, the traveler, whispered in legends of hands that grasped, carried, conquered continents. Fortune struck swiftly: snatched from the mug by a colleague, it marked orders in the showroom before a German customer slipped it into his bag. Waking up to the light of a hotel lamp on a nightstand, Matita smiled—his great adventure had just begun.
Do you know what happened next to the pencil? Did the German lady take it back home, or did she leave it behind? Maybe the next hotel guest was a criminal who was planning a murder and used the pencil to write a phone number on the pad net to it. Matita remembered the number and needed to tell someone, but how?
Can you complete the story?
Author
dev-email@wpengine.local