I Found A Leather-Bound Case In A Tree And I Really Wish I Had Never Found It

The handwriting was strange. It didn’t look quite like anyone’s handwriting I’d ever seen before. Each letter was written with a precision that managed to be inviting and off-putting at the same time. If it wasn’t so obviously written in pencil, I’d have sworn the letters had been typed they were so carefully formed.

On my way back in the house, my mom asked if my trip to the forest had worked. I nodded hesitantly, and she nodded back in a way that I took, at the time, to mean that perhaps she had been the one to provide the pencil case. I knew my mother, and she was crafty enough to pull a good trick if it was one done with no harmful intentions, and I quickly dismissed any weird feelings the whole incident had brought up in me.

And I did draw. I rushed to my room with pencils in hand, grabbed a sheet of paper, and went to it. I’d like to say that I was suddenly transformed into an artist on par with the Italian masters, but this was not the case. However, I did notice that my lines seemed to be straighter, my curves more pleasing, and almost every proportion I eyeballed seemed to come out pretty close, if not spot on. When I’d finished that first drawing (a cartoony sci-fi scene) I had to say that while it wasn’t great, probably wasn’t even good, it was a marked improvement over anything I’d produced previously.

The coming year saw me using the pencils a lot. I quickly found myself finishing several drawings a day, with each one showing small signs of improvement. A little better shading on this one, a little more detail on that one, a little better use of perspective on this other one; it was starting to add up. The pencils wore out slowly too; the leads never broke, the erasers never ran out until the pencils did, that sort of thing. I had put the unfolded note reading ‘draw’ above my desk but I didn’t need it there to remind me; the pencils themselves seemed to call to me. I never let anyone else borrow them and I never used them for anything banal like school work. I certainly never lost one.

It was the fifth pencil that snapped. I hadn’t been using it for very long, maybe only a month or so. Though I rarely took them out of my backpack, I had taken to bringing the pencils with me to school as I didn’t like the idea of not knowing for sure where they were. Though I had started drawing at every opportunity, I had gotten past the point of exclusively using those pencils, and I was finding that the gap between the work I produced with regular pens and pencils, and the ones I produced with those special pencils was getting smaller. There was still a gap though; when I used regular pencils there would be lots of little imperfections in my work; smudges, uneven lines, slight miscalculations of perspective, the typical mistakes of any aspiring artist. I never made those little mistakes with the special pencils. That was why one day, in art class, I decided I had to take them out.

My middle school was located in a university town and all the professor’s kids went there. This meant that by 7th grade, the academics were already getting pretty rigorous and even in non-academic classes you were expected to work hard for your grades. The art teacher was particularly intense. She was a world weary cancer survivor who expected a level of quality that almost no 7th grader was capable of matching. Though I tried hard to please her, I frequently found myself coming home with a B or a C and rarely an A. I had even earned a couple of Ds, which I had never done before in any class. In spite of this, I was reluctant to pull out the pencils in class, simply because something about it felt wrong. Once or twice I had reached for the case and every time it would feel like the bottom dropped out of my stomach. This meant that the only assignments I could be sure of were the ones she assigned as homework, which were few and far between.