The Understudy Comma

A FABLE ABOUT THE ONE WHO KEPT THINGS GOING

In the bottom drawer of a printer’s type case, in the little wooden cell beside the period, there lived a comma.

The period was the star of the shop. Every sentence saved its last breath for him. Telegrams could not send their bad news without him; contracts could not close; love letters could not work up the nerve to stop. The printer’s apprentice polished him on Sundays.

The comma was the understudy. She went on a hundred times a day and was never once applauded, because her whole art was making sure nothing ended. She held doors open between clauses. She caught lists before they fell. She was picked up, pressed into the middle of things, and put back, and the sentences went on past her as if she were furniture.

“You are almost a period,” the apprentice told her once, kindly, holding her up to the lamp. “Same head. You just haven’t learned to sit still.”

She thought about that for a long time. The tail, she decided, was not a failure to sit still. It was the part of her that leaned toward whatever came next.

One evening, setting the last line of the last page of a book, the apprentice reached into the period’s cell and found it empty — he was in the proof of another page, holding down the end of a different sentence, and there was no time to fetch him. The press was hot. The line read: and she was never seen in that country again

He looked at the comma for a long moment. Then he set her at the end of the line, tail and all, and printed it.

The readers, later, all agreed it was the finest ending the book could have had. The sentence stopped — but the tail leaned on toward the margin, and every one of them sat there a while, certain that somewhere past the edge of the page, she was still going.

The moral, set in the last line: an ending that leans is called a beginning by everyone who survives it.