Andy Hawthorne

The thing about notebooks is that they have one job. One…

They’re supposed to hold pages. This is not, in the grand scheme of the universe, a terribly ambitious brief. They don’t need to achieve warp speed, solve the three-body problem, or make a decent cup of tea (which, as we all know, is actually the most difficult thing in the known cosmos). They just need to keep their pages attached to their spine in a manner that doesn’t constitute a complete abandonment of their core purpose.

So when I purchased a new notebook—having filled my previous one with the sort of important thoughts that would undoubtedly change the world if anyone could decipher my handwriting—I had what I considered to be reasonable expectations.

For approximately forty-eight hours, these expectations were met. The notebook performed admirably. It held my pen. It received my words. It stayed closed when I wanted it closed and open when I wanted it open, which is really all you can ask of a notebook without veering into the territory of the unreasonably demanding.

Then the pages began their exodus.

Not all at once, mind you. That would have been honest, at least. No, they left gradually, like dinner guests who’ve realised the party is dreadful but don’t want to appear rude. One here, two there. A small pile by Tuesday. A confetti shower by Thursday.

I returned to the shop.

The shop assistant—let’s call her Sarah, because that’s almost certainly not her name but feels statistically probable—examined the notebook with the weary expression of someone who has seen this particular disaster before and knows she will see it again, possibly before lunch.

“Ah,” she said, which is the universal sound of recognition mixed with resignation. She tapped at her computer with the sort of rhythmic melancholy usually reserved for funeral drums. “Yes. This problem. Again.”

“Can I exchange it?” I asked, clinging to hope the way a drowning man clings to a rubber duck—which is to say, inappropriately and with insufficient regard for the facts.

“You could,” she said, in the tone of someone about to explain why you really, really shouldn’t. “But I’m afraid they’ll all be the same.”

“All of them?”

“Every last one.”

“But surely—”

“You see,” she interrupted, with the patient air of someone explaining quantum mechanics to a Labrador, “it’s where they’re manufactured. The company makes products that are reliable enough not to get sued, but unreliable enough to keep costs down. Everything they produce is just…” she paused, searching for the word, “…okay.”

I stared at her. The shop’s fluorescent lights hummed their agreement with her analysis.

“Right,” I said slowly. “So…”

“Yes,” she confirmed, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth—the smile of someone who has been waiting all day to deliver a punchline they didn’t write but have been forced to perform. “They’re made at a satis-factory.”

There was a moment—just a moment—where the universe paused to consider whether this joke had actually just happened in three-dimensional space-time, or whether it had been some sort of linguistic hallucination brought on by excessive exposure to defective stationery.

Sadly, it had happened.

I left the shop with my disintegrating notebook and a profound sense that somewhere, somehow, the universe was having a laugh at my expense. Which, when you think about it, is really all any of us can expect from a cosmos that gave us both consciousness and mortality but forgot to include an instruction manual.

Or rather, it did include one, but all the pages fell out.