She sat in a coffeeshop overlooking a busy street, in the corner table by the window.  A small girl, with somber eyes and a quiet smile.  Black hair, black coffee, a black hat placed on the chair beside her.  Not much to look at, but then, no one was looking.

Except her.

She had a notebook open on the table in front of her, next to her coffee.  A tattered thing, well worn and beaten at the edges, but sturdy still.  Smiling slightly,  she looked out the window, watching the people swarm on the street, wet and bright under the night sky, and she'd tap her pen twice, take a sip from her cup, and then jot down a short phrase in the book.

She didn't know what she wrote, not really.  It wasn't a premeditated thing, it wasn't even a story--just fragments, one for each person.  They didn't fit together until later, when, having been started and abandoned by her pen, they grew on their own and wrote themselves into whole sentences and paragraphs and sometimes even full pages.  She couldn't edit them after; half the time she couldn't even read them.  She'd flip past the older pages, filled up with writing, and only catch incidental words, fleeting images.  It was frustrating sometimes, but she understood that was just the way of things.  All she could do was seed the phrases.  Just how it was, and you had to accept it.

Once she wrote a person, she couldn't write them again.  Most she wrote in their their 20s, their 30s, their teens if she was short that day.  Sometimes she'd write a child, if they caught her eye.  Sometimes she wouldn't catch someone till their 50s or 60s.  She wondered about the people she never got a chance to write, then wondered if it was presumptious of her to wonder.  She wasn't omniscient after all, she only did what she could.  And that, too, was the way it was.

She'd hear people talking around her, sometimes.  She liked it best when she chanced to overhear the ones she'd written, years later, to see how it all turned out, make sense of the snatches she could get from her book.  Often they'd mention her by name.  They tended to ascribe too much to her, and too little to themselves, she thought.  She only seeded the phrases, and did her best to catch people at the right time.

Her sister was the one who could read the whole book: her ultimate editor.  She'd be the one to rip out the pages, when she wanted.  But she couldn't write in it, and that, too was just the way it was.  You just had to accept it.