The Missing Piece

Text 1: Surface Wear, by Sana Mirza

An original short story extract.

At nine o’clock, the conservation room was clean, square and obedient. Mina liked it that way. The blinds were lowered to protect the documents from sunlight; the temperature display showed a steady eighteen degrees; her sharpened pencils lay parallel beside the inspection sheet. There was nothing mysterious about old paper. Paper had fibres, weight, damage. All of it could be observed and recorded.

The parcel waited in the centre of the table. According to the label, it contained a merchant’s account book, recently discovered in a locked chest. Mina photographed the wrapping, measured the parcel and placed a support beneath it. Photograph. Measure. Support. Open. The familiar order settled her breathing as she loosened the cotton tape.

It came free too easily.

Mina stopped. Along the spine of the account book, the thread was pale cream, but the holes it passed through were dark with age. New thread. Old holes. She bent closer. A thin ridge of hardened wax ran beneath the cover, almost hidden by dust. The room no longer seemed empty; its silence appeared to lean over her shoulder.

She began to turn the pages. One. Two. Three. Each leaf lifted with a dry whisper. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. The columns of faded figures continued without interruption, neat and ordinary. At page forty-one, Mina paused. The next page was thicker than the others.

She eased the sheets apart. A rectangle had been removed from the centre of page forty-two. Not torn. Cut. Its edges were straight enough to have been made with a blade, and they were still sharp and white, not yet darkened like the rest of the page.

Mina reached for the inspection record. At the bottom, beneath the words “surface wear only”, someone had written a final sentence in black ink: “Binding intact; parcel unopened since 1978.”