Vedokrok and the unfinished page

Something moved in the margin #

At the back of a library stood a book nobody had finished. On its last page, someone had written: ‘I’ll begin when I know enough.’ The rest was blank.

One evening, the little yellow mark beneath that sentence grew tired of waiting. It wriggled out of the paper, shook the ink from its feet and dropped onto the desk. Two dots became eyes. A curved stroke became a mouth. It was about the size of a pear and looked pleasantly surprised to exist.

‘What are you?’ asked the librarian.

The little thing looked down at itself. ‘Still finding out.’

The librarian had heard worse answers. She found it a black backpack, small enough to fit, and a notebook with plenty of empty pages. By morning, it had a name: Vedokrok. By lunchtime, it had a problem.

A backpack full of everything #

Vedokrok wanted to be ready for the world. It packed a book about weather, three about roads, a guide to birds and a large volume called Things That Might Possibly Go Wrong. Then it added the second volume.

A book about boats went in too. Vedokrok had never seen a boat, but that seemed an excellent reason to prepare.

At the library door, the backpack wedged between the frame and the umbrella stand. Vedokrok’s feet kept walking. The rest of it stayed put.

The librarian helped it back out. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I haven’t decided. I’m getting ready.’

She sat beside it on the step. ‘You can come back for another book, you know.’

That possibility had not occurred to Vedokrok. It unpacked the boats, the birds and both volumes of trouble. It kept the notebook. The door suddenly became wide enough.

The paper plane had other plans #

Outside, a child was trying to fly a paper plane across a puddle. Each flight ended nose-first in the water. The plane was beginning to resemble a tired duck.

Vedokrok was delighted. Here was a problem with a shape, a sound and somewhere to stand. It hurried back for the book about flight.

It read ten pages. Then twenty. The child made a fresh plane and waited.

‘Throw it harder,’ Vedokrok announced at last.

The plane hit the lamp post.

‘Have you tried that yourself?’ asked the child.

Vedokrok looked at the book, then at the plane. ‘No.’

The child handed it a sheet of paper. This was a much less comfortable object than a page with an answer on it.

The first useful page #

They folded another plane. Vedokrok threw it. It turned left and landed in the puddle. For a moment, it considered calling the puddle a landing place. Then it took out the notebook.

‘Turned left. Got wet,’ it wrote.

The child straightened one fold. Vedokrok tried again. This time the plane passed the lamp post, skimmed the puddle and settled on the dry step beyond it.

There were no trumpets. A pigeon continued inspecting a crust. But Vedokrok ran around the puddle to fetch the plane, grinning so broadly that its ink nearly cracked.

Under the first note, it wrote: ‘This one crossed. Try again before we get too pleased.’

It left room beneath that. The book about flight was still useful. So were the crooked fold, the wet paper and the child who had asked an awkward question. None of those had fitted neatly into its first answer.

Room for tomorrow #

That evening, the librarian found Vedokrok asleep beside its notebook. The black backpack hung from a chair. Inside were a pencil, the little book, a folded plane and a biscuit wrapped in paper. It had become very particular about leaving space for a biscuit.

She opened the unfinished library book. The old sentence was still there: ‘I’ll begin when I know enough.’ Below it, in small, uneven letters, someone had added: ‘Today I began. Here is what happened.’

The rest of the page was blank. She left it that way.

Since then, in this little tale, Vedokrok has travelled with a book and a backpack. It still reads too long sometimes. It still gets things wrong. When it feels certain, it remembers the lamp post.

And if you ever spot a small yellow creature in the margin of a page, looking from the words to the world outside, it may be waiting for you to finish reading. It has a plane to test.