By dawn, Will had decided: he would restore the entire journal. Not as a job. As an act of will.
Two years later, Sabine Durand’s garden poem was read at a UN climate rally. A high school in Vermont named a library after her. And Will Power Edward Aubanel, standing in the back of a crowded auditorium, watched a ghost take a bow.
He published Sabine’s poems under a small press he founded called No Witness Press . The first run was thirty copies, hand-bound by Will. One found its way to a poet in Montreal, who read it on public radio. Then a scholar in Lyon. Then a filmmaker.
The breakthrough came when he found a letter Sabine had hidden in a false spine: a plea to her sister to burn the poems. “They are too fragile for a world that sharpens its teeth on soft things.” Will Power Edward Aubanel
“What grows in the dark does not ask for a witness.”
Will smiled. “Because someone had to will her back into the world. And I had the right name for it.”
Months passed. He catalogued, de-acidified, resewed bindings. He learned obsolete dialect words. He wrote to rare-book dealers, begged for microfilm access, argued with a dean who said Sabine wasn’t “marketable.” His name, Will Power, became a quiet joke among grant committees—but also a promise. He wouldn’t stop. By dawn, Will had decided: he would restore
That night, unable to sleep, Will returned to the library. He began to translate the journal by flashlight. Sabine’s poems weren’t minor at all. They were devastating—about a woman who built a garden in a prison yard, who taught illiterate factory girls to read using smuggled newspapers, who loved another woman and wrote about it as if the sky were a held breath.
Here’s a short story built around the name . Title: The Last Syllable
He had power. And he knew exactly what to do with it. Two years later, Sabine Durand’s garden poem was
One Tuesday, a water-damaged box arrived from a condemned estate. Inside: a 19th-century journal bound in cracked leather. The owner had been a minor poet named Sabine Durand, erased from history because her patron had been a political dissident. As Will carefully separated the pulp-molded pages, he found something strange—a pressed fern, and beneath it, a single line of verse:
He went home, brewed tea, and started on the next box—a shoemaker’s diary from 1888, filled with pressed flowers and the names of lost children.
Will understood then. His father hadn’t been mocking him. He’d been naming a prophecy: a person whose entire existence was a verb. To will power into being, for things that had none.
By thirty-five, Will had become a man of quiet, stubborn decency—not because of his name, but in spite of it. He worked as a restoration archivist at a failing municipal library, repairing books no one else wanted to read. His coworkers called him Ed.