Molly almost stepped on it, buried in the snow like that. But she glanced down and the broken cap caught her eye and so the shattered husk of the cheap little disposable pen ended up next to her boot instead of under it. Then she leaned in to look closer because it’s not every day you see that sort of thing – a pen in the street, broken to still-clinging bits so clinically by a car tire or someone’s foot or who-knows-what – and she thought that she saw something very tiny clinging to the frigid edge of where the seeping ink glued itself against the broken walls of its haft.
That interested her. So she picked the broken pen up and wiped it clean of slush and brought it home from school with her and after she was done eating dinner she took it up to her room, stole her brother’s microscope, and put the pen under it.
The tiny object was a little bubble of scraped plastic, held together with thickened ink clots. And as she watched, a tiny, tiny little body toddled out its front door, stretched, plucked up a slender and colourful pole, and walked down to the edge of the ink gulf.
The trip took it twenty minutes, and by the time Molly was ordered to go to bed because Tomorrow Is A School Day Damnit six oily, inky little squirmy blobs had been plucked from the inksea and stowed in some kind of microscopic bottle for later use.
She couldn’t sleep for a long, long time after that.
***
Molly’s schoolwork suffered for the next week, and not just for the lack of sleep (which her mother insisted on battling with earlier and earlier bedtimes). She was distracted.
At home she spent hours over the microscope, pouring over the tiny life on the shores of the inky gulf. The inhabitants were a family of varied size and shapes that didn’t quite make sense, subsisting on bottled game taken from the blue sea and building tiny structures of shaved plastic. Their fishing tools were crafted from splintered tufts of pen-cap, and were exceedingly rare. In fact, this shard of main-haft pen was a long way from the cap. How had they found it?
The answer came on day three, when a miniscule caravan came to town. It was towed by a single giant crawling thing of legs, and atop its long, long back squirmed a healthy stock of its children, which disembarked and offered up many slivers of fresh cap-material. They were traded for vats and tubs of the ink-sea’s bounty, and the caravan stayed for some days before departing capwards again.
Molly took some photographs to mark the position of her original village and followed the caravan’s progress across the pen-haft with careful eye. It travelled through long serrated plastic forests of startling transparency and sharpness; it travelled through deep grooves once home to rushing rivers of ink; it walked along the perilous thread of the spring that dangled over the dry abyss that had run blue before the shattering; it travelled in long slow helixs across the short-horizon of the pen’s walls and always, always onward towards the long horizon of the cap. On this trip it halted innumerable times – it stopped amidst tiny roughened badlands where bubbles of air were mined from within the pen’s walls; it stopped on tough and hardy clot-masses that had glued themselves to the underside of the spring’s spiral silver shaft; it stopped in floating crumbs that bobbed in ink—waves and floated from one side of a great shallow sea to another; it stopped at deep crevices where strange dried clots squirmed in darkness and sought in consternation for a safe path around, or over, or through.
The last were more and more common. It seemed that the shattering of the pen was a recent affair, and not one that its inhabitants were comfortable with.
Molly followed her caravan to its home at the great round basin-peak of the pen’s-cap, where it disgorged its cargo of food and exotic materials to be distributed among the poor and small of its many-legged kind (the smallest were balls of so many legs that they appeared to not have any legs at all). Then she went to bed and slept, and her dreams were troubling and many. Hunger and fear were there, but not her own. They remained just out of sight, just out of reach, growing and spiralling unchecked and out of control.
On her way home from school the next day, she stopped by a hardware store and bought six different kinds of glue and a selection of unspeakably tiny brushes.
***
The cracks were Molly’s first target. Each was examined and monitored for at least three full sessions of four hours before she dared bring her brush into play; she had to make sure they were clear of life, that they were structurally damaging, that their sealing would cause no further disruption. Many of her smallest brushes were too large and clumsy, and the tip of one of her grandmother’s needles was brought into play. Vast gaping crevices in the horizon-walls were sealed shut and left smooth and shining in a stead march from base to cap.
After that, she refilled the ink-seas. Slowly, gradually, drip by drip. Unlike the cracks, here disruption was inevitable, so she settled for an undeniable-but-slow approach, swelling the blue waves higher and higher so that all would see them rise and seek safer ground. Twice she had to pause for stragglers, but only twice, and the unsealed cracks she’d left proved their value as refugia for the slow and the stubborn and the species too sessile to move.
The pen-tip was the greatest challenge; the cone had been lost in some snowdrift, along with any residents it might have once possessed. After much agonizing, online shopping, and careful examination of several of her mother’s ball-points under the microscope, Molly determined that for whatever reason life was not universal to all pens, and so sacrificed an uninhabited one under the knife, screwdriver, and tweezers to re-establish the structure of her own.
The surgical transplant took hours, even with a minuscule vise she’d been able to buy second-hand from a defunct jewellery store. Every thirty seconds she stopped, wiped away the sweat, had a big drink of water, and breathed in and out. It was shockingly noisy.
***
Molly had thought she’d known pens. Not before she’d found her pen in that snowdrift, but before she sat down to repair it. It turned out she hadn’t known jack because good lord you learned a pen inside out and outside in if you were being really diligent about fixing it. She knew the bay and oceans and depths of its inksea; she knew the contours and gulleys and hills of its walls; she knew the secrets of its inner walls (sealed and unsealed); she knew the thriving life of its cap-end (burgeoning with activity and hope now that the land was once more whole); she knew the ancient hidden secrets of the spring-dwellers, now oncemore sheathed safely in the blue; she even knew the few curious and hardy adventurers that had made their way down into the shining depths of the freshly-attached nose cone, witnessing the adherence of a new form of matter they’d thought would nevermore exist within their grasp.
Molly knew them all, and she loved them, and she put the pen in her pen holder where it stood in place of pride until three days later her mom went looking for a pen and took it without asking, whereupon she never saw it again for the rest of her life.
***
This is the actual answer to the Problem of Evil.