Ornamental letter R with flourishes in blue ink

The ink has finally stopped sulking, so I can write without blotting every second word. Mr Halloran set me the capital R on Monday and said I was to draw it until my wrist forgot it had ever been a wrist. Forty sheets, he said, and not one of them to be pretty yet. Only true.

By Thursday I had torn up thirty-one. The serif kept sitting crooked on the upright, and the bowl would go fat on one side like a loaf left too long in the oven. He never raised his voice. He just laid his own sheet over mine, held it up to the window, and said, "Here, the tail is a river. It must come back to where it started, or it is only a scratch."

I did not understand him until Saturday, when I was alone with the pen and the light was going grey over the yard. I stopped thinking about the letter and let the loop run out past the edge of the paper, round and back under itself, and the flourishes simply followed, the way water finds the low ground. For the first time the line did not argue with me.

Halloran came in on Sunday, looked for a long time, then pinned the sheet to the board beside the door. He did not say it was good. He wrote the date in the corner, the way he does for work he means to keep. Tell Mother I have made something that will hang where people can see it, and that I am coming home for supper on Wednesday, whether or not the ink is dry.

Your loving brother, Tom