The Forest

Before

The point of the lead snapped off. There was no warning before it suddenly splintered, littering grey dust all over the page. The ash smear was like the mark left behind when a firework goes off, a sort of star shape, smudged directly over the drawing he had been minutes away from finishing. His hand froze in place for a heartbeat, startled, and the nib smiled at him with its jagged lead teeth.

Before he knew what he had done, the pencil was hurtling across the room. It sailed maybe a metre away before clattering to the floor. And slowly rolling back across the floorboards, to settle against his foot. It did not help his mood. He kicked it hard enough to knock it under the bed, where it thankfully stayed put— If it had the audacity to come back for a second time, he might have snapped the stupid thing in half.

Anger quickly faded to frustration. He slumped into the back of the chair, shoulders heavy. An hour's work ruined, all because these cheap pencil crumbled like chalk if you applied the slightest hint of force. They were unusable. The spoiling smudge in the middle of his drawing made him wonder whether it was even worth the energy to get annoyed. Did it matter? The part of him that had just wasted an hour meticulously bringing each detail together reasoned a vehement yes. Would it be possible to erase the out-of-place stain without smudging everything else? He thought maybe for a moment, before deciding he didn't care anymore. The lines and shapes he had sketched barely resembled her even without that ashy star in the middle. It was only a little mark, but she was so little, and it was impossible to interpret tiny details he had never been able to properly see.
Fine. He would erase it all. After sharpening the pencil— because, as detestable as it was, it was the only one left.

It would have taken far less effort just to rip the page from the sketchbook and crumple it into a ball, throw the pencil out of the window and into the road, but he didn't have pages to spare. Or pencils. Instead, he smoothed out the paper with three firm sweeps of his arm and reached across the desk for a sharpener. His hand closed on air. Stupidly, he still felt around for a second before remembering it wasn't there. And that it was never going to be there, no matter how many times he forgot.
He cast a dirty look at his desk— a rickety thing made of some old wood that was battered after generations of use. One corner was splattered in dry paints (not such an ancient addition), the top face peppered with rubbery crumbs and pinprick potholes from his compass. Most of the smears had come from the leaky felt pens, but a few were from attempts to doodle on the gnarled wood. They always met the same fate of being scribbled away when the lines came out all wrong.
It was a workspace that could barely be considered organised even on good days. And today was not a good day. In the left corner were schoolbooks, stacked up. A tower of useless equations, dead authors and half-made essays he should really dedicate some time to finishing. The right side was more cheerful, with all his stationary sort of just piled up into a mound. Colouring pencils were spilling over each other and poking through paintbrush bristles. Everything had a place. However chaotic it probably seemed to everyone else.
He had to admit, things were messy even by his standards. He hadn't had much motivation to tidy up for the past few days. Weeks. 

He smiled weakly at the mess, knowing there was no sharpener to be found there, in a drawer, or anywhere else in the room. A crack in the wall drew his eyes. Just above his desk, maybe the height of his hand. A scary drop for littler eyes.
Still smiling, he took up one of the rubbers and began scrubbing the page. The drawing that was supposed to be Lyn faded under the heat, and his momentary smile seemed to fade with it. How silly that he still did that, his mind reaching for things that weren't there. A year would be enough time for most people to get into their heads that the sharpeners you give to tiny girls tend to stay missing. When people run away, their beds are still empty when you wake up the next morning, and the next, and the next and every day that comes after that. No matter how dusty all of the things they left behind become, they won't come back to clean them. With every passing day their desk in the corner of the classroom becomes more vandalised, obscene words appearing on the wood, but they won't suddenly appear to defend it.