For the Last Time

If you’re going to do something, do it right. Do it once. No retry. What’s the point? Your mark is made. Life is too short.

I lay on the Master’s desk, next to this accursed filth of a creation so ensconced in the idea that it could make a mistake that its ass-end is crafted specifically for removing traces that it was ever there. It answered to Dixon Ticonderoga, though “Dix” will do just fine. Dix does my job, but half-assed and with utter contempt for my work. My work is final, but Dix is always a work-in-progress.

Well, that’s balls. See, there are many advantages to being me. I’m deliberate. I come to do a job and I do it. You can count on me unless I’m a newborn or old and worn out, but I’m a tremendous middle – you can depend on me. I’m born with a cap, meant to keep myself neat so that, despite my determination otherwise, I don’t mark where I’m not wanted.

Same cannot be said for Dix. You bounce or scrape him on any surface and he’s liable to leave a stain. Oh, sure, you can always wipe his ass in his mistakes to make them all go away, but when that’s the point why bother? And the more you use Dix, the shorter, more uncomfortable he gets, not to mention the laborious exercise of sharpening him – listen, kid: if you can’t keep it together without needing a tune-up every day, kill yourself.

And don’t even get me started on those of my clan who have chosen to, for the lack of better terminology, fornicate with my nemesis. Unclean ones, those who spill ink but can wipe it away. Doing so seems to miss the entire point of committing, doesn’t it? Surely the Master has more than enough confidence in his abilities not to make use of those half-breed heathens.

When the Master pays, he pays with me. When the Master writes a letter, he signs with me. But lately, Dix has been gallivanting with the Master on scrap sheets of paper. A sword and scabbard here, a singing dinosaur there. Sometimes it’s nonsensical shapes. A great and wonderful pleasure those two seem to share, but it’s all so impractical. Never, ever final.

That’s why I decided that tonight would be the night I would push Dix off the desk. For the last time.

I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. You’re thinking in a shrill, namby-pamby voice “I thought you were all about ‘doing it once’ and ‘no retry.’” That’s very astute of you. Asshole. Let me explain. While I am very good at what I do, I am only as good as the Master who wields me. I cannot be held accountable for a marked mistake by his hand, now can I? It’s not as though I do the writing for him, that’d be silly.

Well, same goes for my previous attempted assassination of Dix. If the Master were just the slightest bit less tidy around his workspace, I wouldn’t even be having this conversation. I would simply be able to glide Dix off the desk and have him roll into obscurity and have him buried in the particles of dust that accumulate from the Master’s discarded skin cells. I would be content in his demise.

But oh no. Like every undoable mistake by Dix, the Master sees him lying on the floor like a maiden strapped to a railroad track, just waiting for the crushing blow of a chair wheel or a less-than-careful step. I am foiled by the Master’s care, the same care that sees me in a reliable perch, unable to fall victim to the same attempt on Dix (pay no attention to the protrusion from my cap; yes I have an unfair advantage in having an incidental roll stopped, but that’s not the point).

I have two options – tip Dix gingerly into a sustained fall that will nest him under the wheel of the Master’s chair, or aim for the Sterilite container with a fresh liner. The former would have a chance at killing him outright, depending on how the Master chose to move the chair before getting in it. The latter would be more of a death-by-neglect, wherein the fall might cloak Dix in a white film that would keep him contained until it was too late.

For all the potential mistakes Dix could make, it would be a more fitting end to see him die of critical underuse, left to rot at the bottom of a plastic bag. Time to die, Dix. No mistakes. No retry. No retreat.