Vault of Quiet Seeds

I found the door beneath the orchard’s ribs, where roots read the earth like a long, dark score. Inside, jars held the hush of future forests, each seed a folded lantern waiting to be named.

The air tasted of rain remembered by stone, of dust that has learned the alphabet of time. Shelves rose like slow terraces of soil, and silence moved between them as a careful clerk.

I lifted one jar, a speck no larger than a breath, and felt the weight of summers it had never spent. The glass warmed in my hands like a pocketed sun, and I heard a distant field stir in its sleep.

When I left, the sky was thin with early birds, their wings a soft index turning the morning. I kept no seed, only the bright ache of it, a promise of green tucked behind my ribs.