The pale boy opened his drawer, shuffled through all the worthless papers, took out his pencil and walked soberly over to his desk where three sharpeners stood.

 This was the hardest part. Had always been. Two of the sharpeners would break the pencil, damage it, and once the pencil was damaged, the boy was damaged.

 The boy was very brittle.

 The pencil was very brittle.

 If you, dear reader, cared to examine the pencil, you would find that right below the word DIXON there were two letters carelessly etched into the pencil. Initials.

 S.F.

 The boy’s name was Seth Flanagan.

 One of the sharpeners would fix him, sharpen him. The pencil’s point was broken; the boy’s arm was missing. Where an arm should have been, was just a stump.

 The boy hesitated to sharpen the pencil. He would normally do ‘Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe’ but this time- he decided- he would just randomly choose.

 He’d been playing with death for some time now, scribbling and writing roughly, breaking the tip of the pencil a deadly amount of times. But he wasn’t going to cheat. How the hell would he be able to cheat?

 Those three sharpeners standing ominously on his desk were the only three in the whole world and its immensity that could sharpen this type of pencil.

 The Death Pencil.

 He’d written more than twenty meaningless short stories with the death pencil, and once he died, the papers on which he had scrawled his stories would begin to singe at the edges and burn themselves, until all that was left was a puny pile of ashes.

 He took another step forward, not scared, not even tingling.

 There was a red sharpener, a tangerine one, and an emerald one.

 He chooses the tangerine sharpener, inserts the pencil neatly into the small hole, and slowly twisted it around.

 Relief.

 He’d won, yet again.

 He pulled out the pencil to find a sharp tip of lead that glistened like dew in the night.

 Next time, he thought, he wouldn’t be so lucky.