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I. Bench record
For the next keeper at Miskatonic: the test pot held archived well-silt, the control plain bark. Only the first flowered. The millimetre scale is legible in every photograph; the colour around the roots is absent.
Hold still, I told the orchid.
Its lower lip had lifted from the fringe
just far enough to shelter
the crescent bitten from my thumbnail.
Under the pot, where water should have drained,
a brightness thickened. Roots grew into it.
I tried the colour chart;
each square looked weathered when I brought it near.
Four drops struck glass. Four drops. The fan
took up the intervals and let them go.
For seven evenings I had come
after the visitors, when every bench
but this one could be left.
I washed the bark-dust from my wrists.
I changed my shirt
before I went to water it.
II. The night porter’s message
She sent this before I described the plant to her. I have kept her words and shortened the silence.
“I killed the light. I tried the latch.
I checked for rain. The pane was dry.
Four knocks, a pause; then four inside
my coat. I took it off.
Hold still.
The dust won’t fall. I can’t brush it off.”
The coat remained in her locked cupboard.
I dreamed its lining opened on my bed:
the cuff, the double stitching,
one pale thread drawn through a needle hole.
I put my arm inside.
The sleeve went on. I walked
along its seam until the greenhouse lights
were smaller than the stitch I had entered through.
At the wrist, a warmth
without a hand.
III. Accession envelope
The packet bears the herbarium’s stamp and the date 1882; although its inventory lists only silt from the Gardner well, I opened it to compare its contents with the dust on her coat.
The dust had settled in a fold
the shape of the flower’s lower lip.
Beneath it, something fine
as the hairs at a wrist was pressed into the paper.
Not a drawing: under magnification,
the fibres bent toward the hollow.
The label gave the weight
as three grams, including paper.
Hold still.
I braced the ruler with my wrist.
The notch beneath my thumbnail fitted;
past the thumbnail, the crease continued
beyond the envelope’s closed end.
I cannot give the date of what came next.
In sleep, the desk withdrew. The paper did not tear.
A pale thread passed through points of light,
and where it tightened, one point dimmed,
then others took its place.
All this before
the fringe had moved a millimetre.
IV. Sleep dictation
The bedside camera shows my closed mouth. The recorder nevertheless retains my pitch, my little clearing cough. I wrote the following on waking.
The lip lay open. Along its rim
suns clotted, loosened, sifted into dust.
A space was kept between the hairs.
Something approaching changed that space
without becoming visible.
The hairs lay flat beneath its passage,
rose with a brightness on their tips.
One light tore loose.
Another, farther down the fringe, fastened.
I tried to raise my hand
beside it for the scale.
Hold still.
The hand was gone. The space went on
accepting distances. The sleeve
I walked through took a crease,
then straightened for a length I couldn’t follow.
I called it nearer. I called it here.
I called until the words wore clear
of breath, and still the voice said here.
On the recording, after I wake
and cross the room,
the word continues at the empty bed.
V. Disposal certificate / enclosure
I cut the roots and burned the plant. I stirred the ash, sealed it, disconnected the water. For three nights the dry glass made no sound. These observations close the bench record.
Before I cut it, I went back
in the clean shirt and set my cheek against
the glass. I waited for the cold
to turn to warmth. It did;
I stood there after I could tell
the warmth was mine.
There is a photograph beneath this sheet.
I kept the one in which my hand
looks least like something offered.
The shirt is washed. The cuff has kept
a faint grey line where something rested,
or where I leaned against the pot.
Set your thumb against the printed lip.
The paper takes your warmth.
Hold still.