Night Shift at the Seed Vault

Under the mountain, drawers slide like patient moons. Each envelope carries a summer folded to dust, corn silk, bitter melon, a rice grain thin as rain, and my breath clouds the barcode scanner.

Outside, the polar dark presses its blue thumb against the concrete door and the sleeping snowmobiles. Inside, labels whisper in twenty languages; paper rustles like small wings refusing winter.

I log accession numbers, dates, the countries of drought, and think of grandmothers tapping seed heads into bowls, of fields gone saline, of rivers learning new maps, of children who will inherit weather as a verb.

At dawn the generators settle to a softer hum. I lock the aisle and switch off the aisle lights, leaving one lamp above the vault, warm as a window, for the next century to find its way in.