“It’s impossible for us to prevent our pencils from being borrowed or taken,” I continued when nobody replied. “There’s no way to ensure who is using one, even if we interrogated them.”

“We could stop selling pencils,” Mother said quietly. Nobody spoke after that.

When our mothers were not looking, you picked up one of the pencils the policeman had thrown. Our eyes met. You nodded and slipped it up your sleeve.

At night, when I heard the rustling from your bed, intentionally loud, I followed you. It would be too easy for our mothers to hear us from their bedroom next door. We ran through the courtyard to the front of the complex, to the workshop. I turned on a light, and you sat at the table where Mother normally sat, pulling a blank notebook off her shelf.

“You do it,” you whispered.

I took the longest pencil. It would have written the least. Up until then, I had only Reforged the samples, never anybody’s real words or stories. I sharpened the point.

I took a breath and pushed the pencil into my wrist.

It was immediately different. Whereas the samples were typically light memories of a day out shopping, this was all darkness. I could see the inside of somebody’s house, a grand desk with a scholar’s rock on the side and art hanging on the walls. The smell of cigarettes and wet calligraphy ink. I could feel the writer’s pulse and the words they scrawled against my skin, as if someone was writing directly on my arm, each stroke carving, each sentence ending with a period on my wrist, drilling through it.

The characters formed something about a daughter, a girl, not so different from us, who was tired of being told to hide in closets when the soldiers came, tired of only being defined by her body, unable to do anything for the war. Who left the house one night, dressed in her brother’s clothing, leaving a note to her parents that she had to do something other than hide, was going to fight in any way she could. Whose body was brought back the following week, bayoneted, raped, white and bloated from the river, larger than it had ever been in life.

I don’t remember more. Is it the illness, or did I block it out long before that? I remember my own body convulsed—the floor crashing into my knees and you wrapping your arms around me, shoving a bundle of bandages into my mouth to stop my screaming. I could only rock back and forth, holding on to myself, mind racing between pain and bodies and women, and what it meant to have to be all of those things during a war, wondering if the pain was inescapable.