What the Strata Remember

The limestone does not hurry. It accepts the shells of creatures no eye has named, pressing them flat into its pale patience, one century folded into the next.

Below the limestone, shale — a darker chapter, saltwater and silence, the impression of a fern still faintly legible as a word half-erased.

I press my palm to the cliff face and feel the cold arithmetic of it: ten thousand years per inch, the whole of human wanting a thin seam, almost nothing.

And yet the stone has kept everything — each animal that fell through water, each storm that rearranged the seafloor. It is not indifferent. It is simply a different kind of attention.