due South - Mont Blanc
I appear to be in a melancholy mood. There's no other way to explain this story.
Title: Mont Blanc
Author: Ivy
Words: 865
Rating: G
For the Ink challenge at ds_flashfiction ( simul-posted there).
His second winter in Chicago, Fraser bought a Mont Blanc fountain pen. The price was extravagant - $250 for a pen. He bought it from a pawn shop owner on Racine whose dog he had once rescued from a collapsing fire escape. If he had bought it retail, it would have cost him over $800.
The pen caught his eye in the shop window as he was walking Dief one brisk morning. It lay unassumingly between a beat-up guitar and a rack of badly arranged cameos. A Boheme Vert, black cylinder inlaid with gold. The nib was 14 ct. gold filigree on platinum. He ducked into the store on impulse, leaving Dief panting disconsolately in the slush by the doorway. When he asked the shop keeper to pull it out of the window display, he intended just to hold it.
It rested between his fingers, much heavier than a simple ballpoint. Its heft seemed to come from the weight of the words waiting to be unfurled from within. He looked at it closely, admiring the craftsmanship - this was a work of art, not a simple writing instrument.
The green fountain pen was the exact pen his father had used. Fraser had seen it often as a child when his father wrote in his journal. He had touched it once. His father was home on one of his infrequent visits. Ben was watching him write by the fireplace, hoping that his father was writing about him, when his grandmother called for his father’s help in the kitchen. Robert Fraser capped the pen, closed the notebook and placed both on the seat of the rocking chair.
Knowing he was transgressing, Ben had crossed to the chair and brushed his fingers across the pen and journal. This pen was with his father every day, carried in his breast pocket next to his heart where Benton could never be. Ben picked it up and curled his fist around it, hoping to feel some of that closeness.
That’s when his father had swooped in from the kitchen and snatched the pen from his son’s fingers. Ben didn’t remember the exact words, but he remembered the message: you are too young, you are a child, you cannot be trusted.
This pen survived sub-zero weather, thousand-mile manhunts on dog-sled and being crushed against the perm-frost of the tundra, but it might not survive the touch of a child.
When Fraser held the pen in the pawn shop, he felt the same vulnerability, as if just by holding it he might destroy it. He took a deep breath and closed his fist around the casing. He paid the shopkeeper what money he had in the brim of his Stetson, promising to return the next day with the balance.
He walked out of the shop with the weight of the pen like a fist in his chest pocket, and continued on his walk with Diefenbaker.
Fraser did not keep a journal like his father and he did not use the Mont Blanc for daily tasks at the Consulate. It was too precious for that. But he carried it with him always, until he did not feel the weight of it.
*
Two years later Ray Kowalski dropped Fraser off at the Consulate in the gloaming of a winter evening. Ray was talking a mile a minute, recapping the chase scene of that afternoon. The arrest had been an unremarkable one except that this perpetrator had attempted to stop Fraser’s advance by swinging a two-by-four at his chest. Fraser had gone down, wind knocked out of him, but Ray had intercepted the criminal before he could continue his escape. Just an average day for Fraser in Chicago. Fraser looked out the window at the gathering dark and thought of longer twilights above the Arctic Circle.
Once inside, Fraser greeted Turnbull briefly and headed up to his office, unbuttoning his overcoat. When he peeled it off and hung it behind the door, he noticed that his hands were smudged in black. He frowned and glanced down at his tunic. Spreading from his left breast pocket was a black stain. He unbuttoned the flap and pulled out his pen, the twin of his father’s pen, a pen he had not once felt comfortable using. Its barrel was cracked, splintering from one end to the other. Everywhere it touched his skin it left a pool of thick black ink.
Fraser tossed it into the wastebasket and removed his tunic, noting that the ink had soaked through his undershirt as well. He walked quickly to the bathroom, hoping that if he soaked the cloth immediately the stain would not set, but knowing that it would. He pushed the tunic and his undershirt into the hot water in the sink’s basin, running his hands back and forth beneath the tap. The ink clung to his skin, seeping into the ridges and furrows of his fingers. He scrubbed it with a bar of soap, thinking that the ink was harder to remove than blood.
He set the soap down and glanced up at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. On his chest, over his heart, the pen had left a black stain.
Read on AO3.
Title: Mont Blanc
Author: Ivy
Words: 865
Rating: G
For the Ink challenge at ds_flashfiction ( simul-posted there).
His second winter in Chicago, Fraser bought a Mont Blanc fountain pen. The price was extravagant - $250 for a pen. He bought it from a pawn shop owner on Racine whose dog he had once rescued from a collapsing fire escape. If he had bought it retail, it would have cost him over $800.
The pen caught his eye in the shop window as he was walking Dief one brisk morning. It lay unassumingly between a beat-up guitar and a rack of badly arranged cameos. A Boheme Vert, black cylinder inlaid with gold. The nib was 14 ct. gold filigree on platinum. He ducked into the store on impulse, leaving Dief panting disconsolately in the slush by the doorway. When he asked the shop keeper to pull it out of the window display, he intended just to hold it.
It rested between his fingers, much heavier than a simple ballpoint. Its heft seemed to come from the weight of the words waiting to be unfurled from within. He looked at it closely, admiring the craftsmanship - this was a work of art, not a simple writing instrument.
The green fountain pen was the exact pen his father had used. Fraser had seen it often as a child when his father wrote in his journal. He had touched it once. His father was home on one of his infrequent visits. Ben was watching him write by the fireplace, hoping that his father was writing about him, when his grandmother called for his father’s help in the kitchen. Robert Fraser capped the pen, closed the notebook and placed both on the seat of the rocking chair.
Knowing he was transgressing, Ben had crossed to the chair and brushed his fingers across the pen and journal. This pen was with his father every day, carried in his breast pocket next to his heart where Benton could never be. Ben picked it up and curled his fist around it, hoping to feel some of that closeness.
That’s when his father had swooped in from the kitchen and snatched the pen from his son’s fingers. Ben didn’t remember the exact words, but he remembered the message: you are too young, you are a child, you cannot be trusted.
This pen survived sub-zero weather, thousand-mile manhunts on dog-sled and being crushed against the perm-frost of the tundra, but it might not survive the touch of a child.
When Fraser held the pen in the pawn shop, he felt the same vulnerability, as if just by holding it he might destroy it. He took a deep breath and closed his fist around the casing. He paid the shopkeeper what money he had in the brim of his Stetson, promising to return the next day with the balance.
He walked out of the shop with the weight of the pen like a fist in his chest pocket, and continued on his walk with Diefenbaker.
Fraser did not keep a journal like his father and he did not use the Mont Blanc for daily tasks at the Consulate. It was too precious for that. But he carried it with him always, until he did not feel the weight of it.
*
Two years later Ray Kowalski dropped Fraser off at the Consulate in the gloaming of a winter evening. Ray was talking a mile a minute, recapping the chase scene of that afternoon. The arrest had been an unremarkable one except that this perpetrator had attempted to stop Fraser’s advance by swinging a two-by-four at his chest. Fraser had gone down, wind knocked out of him, but Ray had intercepted the criminal before he could continue his escape. Just an average day for Fraser in Chicago. Fraser looked out the window at the gathering dark and thought of longer twilights above the Arctic Circle.
Once inside, Fraser greeted Turnbull briefly and headed up to his office, unbuttoning his overcoat. When he peeled it off and hung it behind the door, he noticed that his hands were smudged in black. He frowned and glanced down at his tunic. Spreading from his left breast pocket was a black stain. He unbuttoned the flap and pulled out his pen, the twin of his father’s pen, a pen he had not once felt comfortable using. Its barrel was cracked, splintering from one end to the other. Everywhere it touched his skin it left a pool of thick black ink.
Fraser tossed it into the wastebasket and removed his tunic, noting that the ink had soaked through his undershirt as well. He walked quickly to the bathroom, hoping that if he soaked the cloth immediately the stain would not set, but knowing that it would. He pushed the tunic and his undershirt into the hot water in the sink’s basin, running his hands back and forth beneath the tap. The ink clung to his skin, seeping into the ridges and furrows of his fingers. He scrubbed it with a bar of soap, thinking that the ink was harder to remove than blood.
He set the soap down and glanced up at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. On his chest, over his heart, the pen had left a black stain.
Read on AO3.