RAIN

The stones opened overnight.

Not a bloom — a mouth. We counted fourteen splits on the east gravel. No one heard them. Lithops does not announce. By noon the splits had already begun to look like stones again. Camouflage is faster than our labels.

HIDE

A junior cataloguer tried to number them. The numbers did not stick. We filed the morning as a single entry: the ground looked back.

Hyphae crossed the catalog drawer.

A thread found the iron sample and refused the label. It wrote a pale line from Fe to unfiled and stopped, as if the sentence were enough. We left it. The index is more honest when it contaminates itself.

thread

Publication this month is the drawer, photographed and not cleaned. Readers who want a PDF will be disappointed. Spores do not export.

A core that read as a sentence.

Champagne dust. Chlorophyll flash. Sage clay. Hunter wet. Brick iron. We cut it on a Tuesday and argued about the punctuation until Thursday. The iron band is a period. Some of us still say it is a wound.

Two visitors. One sentence.

They asked for a tour. We gave them a core and the rule: three words, then silence. They walked the gravel until late. One of them found a lithops with their heel and apologised to it. That was the sentence.

IRON

Their letter arrived from the road, still wet. It is on the table now, staining the parchment the colour of the iron band. We are not in a hurry to file it.

What grows after the lights are a bad idea.

The canopy does not close. It changes shift. After visitors, we stop naming. Hyphae do the minutes. If you are reading this in a bright room, you are already too far from the subject.

dust

Next issue after the fourth rain, or after the cabinet refuses another label — whichever comes first. Correspondence: the station answers after rain. Residencies: two chairs, dry season only.