Fiction sample for the 30-minute manuscript test

This sample was written for the test. It is not taken from an unpublished manuscript.

Scene one

The city archive closed at five. At 4:48, Mara was still filling out a request slip while Elias argued with the archivist about his pen.

"Pencils only," the archivist said.

"The cap is on."

"It is still a pen."

Elias came back to the table with two pencils and put one beside Mara's hand.

"We live under tyranny."

"You will recover."

She folded the request slip along the edge of the table. Box 14. Simon Calder. Reservoir surveys, correspondence, private notebooks.

She had copied the shelf number from her father's last voicemail. She had deleted the message before listening a second time.

This was not sentiment. It was admin.

She needed the black survey ledger. Once she had it, the solicitor could finish the estate inventory and everyone could stop asking whether there was anything else her father had forgotten to mention.

The archivist brought over a grey document box and held out her hand. Mara gave her the reader card.

"This collection was restricted until last Tuesday," the archivist said.

"My father died eleven months ago."

"He chose the date when he donated the papers."

That was possible. It was also exactly the sort of thing he would do: leave one last instruction and no explanation for it.

The archivist lifted the lid. There were three folders, a roll of survey maps, and a black ledger held shut by a narrow brass clasp.

Mara counted the folders. She checked the cotton tie around the maps. She looked for water damage on the ledger.

Elias watched her. "You could just say this is difficult."

"It isn't."

"Of course not. That is why you are counting folders."

The clasp had a shallow six-sided socket instead of a keyhole.

Mara pulled a brass key from the chain around her neck. It had no teeth, only a hexagonal tip worn bright at the edges.

Elias looked at the key and then at her. "You said he never left you anything."

"He put it in my mailbox. That is not the same thing."

She fitted the key into the clasp. It would not turn.

"Let me see."

Mara passed it across the table.

Elias held it under the reading lamp. "There is wax in the groove. If you force it, the tip could snap."

A bell sounded at the desk.

"Ten minutes," the archivist called.

Elias checked the wall clock. "That was the fastest two minutes of my life."

"The clock is slow," Mara said.

He wrapped the key in his handkerchief and put it in the inside pocket of his green raincoat. "I have a loupe at home. I can clean it without scratching it."

Mara held out her hand, then let it fall. "Bring it back tomorrow."

"Nine sharp."

"You have never been nine sharp in your life."

Elias closed the box. A cream envelope lay on the table beneath it.

MARA CALDER, written in her father's hand.

The archivist frowned. "That must have slipped out of one of the folders."

Mara picked it up.

"Are you going to open it?" Elias asked.

"Not here."

She put the envelope inside her coat.

"I thought you only came for the ledger."

"I did."

The archivist rang the bell again.


Scene two

The next morning, Mara arrived before Elias.

She told herself this was because the archive opened at nine and Elias treated clocks as suggestions. It had nothing to do with the cream envelope sitting unopened beneath the fruit bowl in her kitchen.

A sign at the bottom of the stairs pointed away from the main reading room.

Water Collections — Room B

The archivist was waiting beside an open door. "There is a leak upstairs. We moved your box down here."

Room B had one table, four chairs, and fluorescent lights that made everyone look mildly unwell. The grey box sat in the middle of the table.

"Your colleague signed in already," the archivist said.

"Elias is here?"

"He went to find the washroom."

Mara sat down and touched the chain at her neck.

The brass key was hanging from it.

She held it in her palm. The groove was clean. She could not remember Elias giving it back.

Perhaps he had dropped it through her letterbox. Perhaps she had put it on without waking properly. Neither explanation felt impossible. Neither felt familiar.

The archivist removed the ledger from the box. "No bags on the table. Pencils only."

Mara fitted the key into the clasp. This time it turned.

The first pages contained measurements from the old reservoir: water depth, silt, cracks in the east wall. Her father had written in the margins in the same cramped hand he used for shopping lists.

Mara turned a page.

There was her childhood address.

Not the house itself. A survey mark on a map of the road behind it, circled twice in blue pencil.

This was not sentiment. It was admin.

She turned another page.

At the bottom, her father had written:

Mara noticed the east wall first. Ask her what she remembers.

A chair scraped in the corridor.

"Elias?" Mara called.

No answer.

The archivist leaned over the ledger. "Your father left instructions for this box."

"What instructions?"

"If you requested it, we were to give you Room B."

"Why?"

"He did not say."

Mara looked again at the note.

She remembered the reservoir picnic. She remembered Elias falling into nettles. She remembered her father shouting at someone across the water.

She did not remember the east wall.

Elias appeared in the doorway, out of breath and holding two coffees.

"Sorry. Wrong staircase." He put one cup beside her and saw the open ledger. "You got it working."

Mara pointed to the note.

Elias read it once. Then again.

"You never told me you were there," he said.

Mara looked at him. "I just told you I don't remember it."

"That isn't what I meant."

End of sample

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