The Old Pencil

1^st Assignment – Trash Thoughts

The bedroom is cool and dim, lit only by a lonesome overhead lamp, hanging quietly above the far-right wall. Cradled just below, a drafting table sits, its dusty glass surface dully reflecting the warm beams of lamplight being cast from overhead. The muffled crackles of rainfall can be faintly heard outside through a sliding glass door set into the opposite wall. Acting adverse to the artificial gleam of the hanging lamp, a soft glow from the cloudy afternoon sky makes its way through the large glass door and bathes the left side of the bedroom’s features, covering the empty bed and draping over the walls in a gentle muddy-blue tone. The bedroom sits in a still silence, drowned in the ambient storm and rattle of rainfall just outside the face of the glass. On the small underbite of the drafting tables glass face, an old pencil rests and waits. Its wood is dulled and exposed through patches where the once bright yellow paint on its body has begun to flake and fall. The eraser at the far end is long since eroded, and nestled deep inside the metal neck of the pencil; a testament to a life of mistakes made and mistakes corrected. The dark lead tip, broken and discarded from the pencil’s long and rugged body, lies in cold silence on the carpeted floor below. The tip of the pencil itself, now a blunt head of wood in absence of its once beautiful lead crown, waits solemnly to be sharpened again. The old pencil waits patiently in the lip of the dusty drafting table, its aspirations of exuberant creation only drowned out by the patter of raindrops outside the empty bedroom.