On the Inventional of the Mechanical Pencil or Why I Did Not Quit Today
2025-Aug-26 • Zary Fekete
Life can’t be all bad because we have mechanical pencils.
The ribbed grooves of its plastic barrel lock into the whorls of my fingerprints like the teeth of ancient gears in some forgotten smelting works. But what pours forth isn’t molten steel or ancestral industry. It’s graphite. Pre-portioned. Dutiful. A brittle gray reed, trained from birth to sacrifice its head in exchange for communication.
You click once and it emerges, exactly 0.5mm, no more, no less. The dignity of that precision feels holy. And then it begins. The tiny black stem drags its body across the page, leaving just enough of itself behind to say: buy bread, email D., do not scream today.
Click again. More graphite. It is always absurdly willing to give more.
This morning, I held the pencil like a relic. The rest of the world…email dings, passive-aggressive memos, a stain on my shirt, and another cracked conversation…blurred into fog. But the pencil remained. Still warm from my palm. Slightly chewed at the end from a year of use. I didn’t mean to make it personal, but we’ve been through some things together.
There’s an honesty to a mechanical pencil that pens can’t match. Pens commit. Pens bleed. But a mechanical pencil is provisional, conditional, hopeful. You write it down, yes, but maybe you’ll erase it. Maybe you'll change your mind. The pencil is fine with that.
When I was a child, my grandmother had a drawer of office supplies we were allowed to burrow through. Inside: batteries that leaked white powder, dried-up glue sticks, rusty matchbox cars, and, like royalty in exile, a single Pentel pencil with a cracked pocket clip and three rods of graphite in the chamber. I remember clicking it more than once. It made the exact sound of my spine settling.
I think about that drawer more than I think about most people from my childhood.
Sometimes I wonder how this object was ever invented. Someone had to look at a wooden pencil…a good, solid, faithful thing…and say: Not enough. Someone had to dream of a better way. A way to never sharpen again. A way to click and click and click and have the world return to you in gray, erasable marks.
I imagine that inventor weeping, just once, when the first mechanism worked. When the graphite advanced cleanly. When it clicked into place with the smooth finality of a door shutting on despair.
I use this pencil to write reminders I will ignore, names I don’t know how to say aloud, and questions no one has answered for me. I make small lists. I draw tiny boxes beside each item so I can tick them off when they’re done. Even if I never tick them off, it comforts me that the boxes are there. There’s a strange power in the preparation to complete.
Once, during a job interview, the man across the table saw my mechanical pencil and said, “Don’t see many of those anymore.” He said it like he was commenting on a birthmark.
I didn’t get that job. But I liked how he noticed.
The eraser is terrible, of course. Always is. They dry out, crumble. They smear more than they erase. Still, I keep the eraser intact, untouched. I think it’s important that it’s there…even if it fails. I think it’s important that it means to forgive.
When I think of the bridge too far, the moment too heavy, the voice too sharp, I also think of this pencil. How it offers me a way to make marks and undo them. How it never leaks, never dries out, never stabs me in the chest like a rogue ballpoint or a politician.
Today, I read my Bible and pressed the graphite to paper and wrote:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” -John 1:5
I drew a small box next to it.
I have not ticked it off. Not yet.
But I haven’t erased it either.
Which, in this life, might be enough.
Zary Fekete
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social