Instructions for Opening the Seed Vault at Midnight

Bring no lantern; the aurora is already reading, green syllables sliding across the steel door, a choir of cold licking the hinges until they remember the shape of spring.

Inside, jars sleep like moons in a cardboard galaxy, barley, millet, beans with their fists closed around weather. Your breath clouds the labels, and each fogged name sounds like a country you almost lost.

Listen: even silence has a germination note, a thin silver thread trembling under the concrete. When you lift one packet, whole fields tilt toward you, black soil rising in the mind like a tide.

Carry them out as if carrying small, stubborn clocks. Plant where the pavement cracked from last August’s heat, where children draw rivers in chalk. By morning, the city will smell faintly of rain not yet fallen.