Ledger of the Seed Vault

At the edge of August, the river climbed the stairs, carrying a mirror of sky and uprooted mailboxes. In the old station, we labeled jars by moonlight, small alphabets of basil, millet, thundergrass.

The generator coughed blue notes into the dark, and moths circled it like hurried violinists. Each seed held a weather it remembered, a dry syllable waiting for a tongue of rain.

By dawn, fog pressed its face to the glass, soft as breath on a chapel window. We stacked tomorrow in careful rows, listening to water count the pilings below.

When the flood receded, mud wrote its long signature. We opened one envelope of earth and planted. From the first green hook, the whole room brightened, as if a wick had found, at last, its oil.