The diary entry

An original fiction passage set in the nineteenth century.

On the afternoon the house was to be sold, Ellen sat alone in the schoolroom with her diary open across her knees. She found the entry for the night Ruth had left: “Eight minutes past eight. Rain against the panes. The front door slammed. Ruth took the small case.” The ink had faded, but the figures were still neat. Beneath them, in darker strokes, Ellen had added: “She has chosen to leave us.”

Ruth came in carrying the sewing box she had left behind. Ellen turned the book towards her. “I have kept it all these years,” she said. Ruth read the lines without sitting down. She did not dispute the hour, the rain or the case. “Did I tell you why I was going?” she asked. Ellen searched the page. There was no answer there, only her own sentence, written before the ink above it had dried.

For a moment Ellen wanted to defend the words. She remembered the slammed door more clearly than the conversation that had come before it. The diary had preserved the clock’s exact minute, the rain on the glass, even the door’s sharp report. It had kept no account of what either sister had said. Ellen had mistaken the things she could list for the whole of the evening.

“I made your silence into an answer,” she said. Ruth set the sewing box beside the diary. “You were hurt,” she replied. “That much is true.” Ellen took up her pen and added beneath the old sentence: “I did not know why she went.” Ruth read the new line, then asked Ellen to keep the box until she could return for it. When the door closed behind her, Ellen left both sentences on the page.

“Through Ellen’s diary, the writer suggests that writing down what happened is not the same as understanding it.”