Pencil Shavings by Nancy Stohlman

Okay, class, since no one wants to be the first to post, I'll step up! This is a piece I've been working on during our class...it's sort of a creative monster piece...

Pencil Shavings

When I was in second grade I took a standardized test that reported I was a gifted child, and everyone became preoccupied with my giftedness, and I got a big, adult-sized desk in my bedroom. Now, instead of watching television after dinner, I got to sit at my big-girl desk and study.

In the top desk drawer was a slew of pencils and an old pencil sharpener, the kind where the razor slices the wood as you spin the pencil around and around. I sat and sharpened pencils over my open fourth grade notebooks and watched perfect coils emerge like chocolate curls on a fancy cake. They wanted to skip me to fourth grade mid-year, skip third grade altogether, me, a second grader, seven years old. The kids in the fourth grade class were so tall, their limbs so fleshy and large, I cowered under their curious stares…I couldn’t do it…if I didn’t go to third grade how would I learn cursive? Multiplication? I watched delicate pencil shavings curl around themselves. I spent hours shaving cascades of thin wooden curls instead of answering the questions in my new workbook on the evolution of dinosaurs I was ashamed I didn’t understand. When the pencil was brought to a nub, a slight bit of red or blue paint tipping the edges of the wooden curls, I would save them in the top desk drawer.

After many weeks the top pencil drawer was full of thin ribbon curls, tightly wound and loose, symmetrical and skeewonkers, red, blue, yellow, green, black tips like butterfly wings. I imagined future sculptures I might create, arranging them by color, size, shape, trying not to disturb them too much since they were so delicate.

One day my dad found the drawer full of pencil curls. “What’s all this trash doing in here?” he said. “Throw it away.”

“But…I think they’re pretty.”

“They’re not pretty, they’re trash. Only trash loves trash. Are you trash?”

I shook my head. I was dizzy as my dad took out the drawer and handed it to me. I carried it to the bathroom and said goodbye to all my beautiful, perfect coils cascading into the garbage can, disintegrating on impact. The drawer was empty. Dust hung in the air. I returned to my big-girl desk and the workbooks I didn’t understand.