Life can’t be entirely lost if Etch A Sketches still exist.
The red plastic frame is absurd in its confidence…chunky, cheerful, childlike. But the weight of it in my hands is serious. Like a communion wafer made for the nervous and easily distracted. Two white knobs, left and right, like the last controls on a console after the ship has broken apart.
Turn one, the line moves horizontally. Turn the other, it moves up and down. Turn both…if your hands are steady, if your heart is gentle…and the line will curve, maybe even form a circle. Or something like it. Nothing is smooth. Everything is approximate. And yet it draws. A line made not of ink or graphite, but absence. A ghost-trail scraped from a field of gray aluminum dust.
I like to make little houses. Bad ones. The roofs always slope wrong, the doors look like tombstones. But I make them anyway. Sometimes I write my name. Or a verse. Or the word "stay."
When the image is finished…or fails…I flip the screen over and shake. Not with anger, but with the kind of trembling you might get from a near-miss or a close friend’s forgiveness. The lines disappear. No dust, no crumbs, no erasure marks. Just gone. Like it never asked to be remembered.
I’ve seen children cry when their Etch A Sketch drawings are erased by accident. As if something permanent had been lost. I’ve felt that. But I’ve also felt the strange mercy of the shake. The quiet, full permission to begin again.
There’s something holy in it. A theology of impermanence.
This morning, I skipped the news and picked up the Etch A Sketch instead. The knobs were cool from the night air. My hands weren’t steady, so the lines wobbled. I tried to draw a tree. It came out looking like a fork struck by lightning. But it felt like prayer.
Sometimes I imagine the inventor, alone in a workshop somewhere in 1950s France, holding the prototype like it was a newborn thought. I hope he shook it once and laughed. I hope he saw the beauty in the vanishing.
Pens bleed. Pencils smudge. But the Etch A Sketch… it forgives completely. Without trace. Without fuss. Without record.
I keep it on a shelf now. Between a clock that doesn’t tick and a Bible that does.
“As far as the east is from the west,” the Psalm says, “so far has He removed our sins.” I think of that sometimes, while the silver dust settles back into place.
They say His mercies are new every morning. The Etch A Sketch doesn’t quite manage “every”…but it comes close enough for days like this.
Zaqary Fekete’s work has appeared in SpillWords, Blood+Honey, and Hawkeye Magazine.