The pen hadn't been worth stealing.
If it had been, someone else would have long taken it from its place on the bank's counter, stuck it in their pocket and walked off feeling not at all like how he was right now. They would have felt good about it. Probably took a stack of bills with them, too, and just took the pen for fun. Maybe they just forgot it was in their hand; maybe the bank clerk handed it to them in an act of generosity toward a good client; maybe this person mattered, a person of importance and prestige and ethics.
Unlike him.
Jack Edwards trudged down the streets of Alden with his new pen in hand. If he hadn't been in a mood he would have noticed how nice a day it was to be in Alden. The winter snow was just draining down from the mountains, filling the town with vacationers wishing to enjoy Alden's famous 'youth bringing' springs, as well as giving new life to the creeks and rivers that ran around it. Alden had been there for centuries living under different, far more unique derivatives of its present day name. Peoples of every background had lived there- some born there, others brought by ship or train or fate.
But Edwards didn't see this. He continued down Gravelin and then Duke and took a right on Crestwater and a left on Mulligan and all the while studied his new pen as the world shifting past him with their shopping bags and sunglasses.
It wasn't a ball point or a fountain. Obviously it was just a pen. Just a lonely pen without even a cap for its head or enough ink to last longer than a couple usages.
He sniffed at the waste of it all and was about to toss the pen in the gutter when he stopped and checked his pockets and thought for a moment.
It was his pen now. And this, this having of something, gave him an almost desperate feeling of hope, a feeling of having something.
It was a feeling he hadn't felt in a long time.
He crossed the street, still marveling at his little pen. It was then that he felt the need to write with his pen. To write something, anything, scribble on whatever was nearest. On whatever would stay and last for an eternity or more; on whatever would let him be a part of it.
A nearby tree, hardly a sprout but not nearly full grown, caught his eye and he almost ran to it, pushing more than one vacationing tourist aside in his whim to write on the bark, on the leaves, on the roots if he could.
It struggled at first to get its ink going but when it did it flowed a wonderful deep blue across the light brown wood. All guilt he had had from taking it vanished in an instant. Edwards gazed in quiet wonder as the pen wrote and drew and sketched like it knew what he wanted. It was a person, a creature, in itself. A working mechanism of life caught in a test tube and doomed to sign checks for the rest of its days, which, Jack learned from the fading lines, were now numbered to mere minutes. Jack wondered what the pen could have done to be punished so, but the pen never said. It didn't like the past, only the future, and everything that lay in it. The pen showed him a world beyond Alden and the streets and the rivers and took him to a place different from any other. One that words sometimes failed to describe and the pen would then have to draw. And it knew how to draw.
Only five minutes passed before the pen dried up completely, but it was enough.
If the citizens of Alden had cared, they would have noticed the bounce in Jack Edwards' step as he made his way to the far bridge. His hands stuck lightly in his pockets, his light hair blowing carefree, he had forgotten about the bank and his failed business and marriage and instead, for this moment, thought about a new place, where perhaps, perhaps, he could make something; something new and different, something that others hadn't seen before and something they would look at and think of him.
Perhaps, all he needed was a pen.