Do not erase

I typed the command on Friday evening and then sat there without pressing return. The screen dimmed once and I woke it and sat there again. Tea went cold at my elbow, which is how I know it was a while. I am not a person who hesitates over a keystroke. I could not have told you at the time what I was waiting for, and I am not sure I can tell you now, except that the waiting felt like the last part of the thing that was still mine to decide.

The disk itself was on the desk to my left, in its paper sleeve, where it has been since I carried it home in April. Eight inches across, black, soft, warm from the lamp. Nothing about it looks like an object that holds anything. The label is white paper gone brown along one edge, and it carries two lines. The first is her initials and the year, Н.А.Н. 1989. The second sits underneath in pencil, smaller, angled slightly down: не стирать. Do not erase.

I have known that handwriting longer than I have known most people. The initials are the kind of mark you make for your own filing, so you can find your own things in a drawer. The pencil line is different. The pencil line is addressed outward, to whoever would come later with a box and a shortage of blank disks, and I have thought about that difference on and off since I was nine years old and picked the black square out of an apartment full of better options.

Then I pressed return. There was a line of white across the top of the screen. I know what is on the disk now, and that is the only sentence about it I am going to write.

She had been at that machine for three years when she wrote those two words, one of two women in her group who worked it. The machine went for scrap in 1997, she retired the year after, and she died in 2009 without once bringing any of it up. Pencil is the least permanent thing that was on that desk. It held for thirty-seven years anyway, mostly because nobody who had the disk could do anything to it. I am the first one who could, and I am not going to.