The nightstand Bible

A traveling representative restocks the drawer twice a year on a route that covers forty some-odd properties in a single week, leaving one book behind at each stop whether or not the previous one is still there, because checking would take longer than replacing. The edition kept at three separate motels, examined in turn, proved identical down to the ribbon: the same red place-marker, the same thin India paper that turns nearly transparent at a bright enough lamp, the same donor plate on the inside cover naming an organization that has been quietly performing this service for over a century. Housekeeping neither removes nor dusts it, treating the drawer's contents as outside the scope of the room's actual cleaning, which means the book's only maintenance is the biannual replacement itself. Guests report opening the drawer looking for a notepad or a spare pillowcase and finding the book instead, an encounter more often startling than welcome, by all accounts. Its spine shows almost no wear across every copy examined, the ribbon still creased from the factory fold rather than any reader's page, suggesting the book performs its function by presence rather than use, the way a smoke detector does its job simply by continuing to exist on the ceiling, unopened, doing nothing anyone can measure, until the one occasion, unrecorded and untraceable, when somebody in the room actually needed it and it was, at least, there.

Beatrice Womack