Far From the Rim

McGetchin crater — near side. Formed somewhere between eleven April and twenty-two May twenty twenty-four. Two hundred twenty-two metres across, about forty-three deep. Largest fresh hole LRO has caught in its lifetime; roughly once in a hundred and thirty years. Impactor the size of a three-to-six-storey building.

No telescope on Earth or in space caught the strike live. The orbiter had the before-and-after; Wagner found the bright spot with its dark halo in the crush later.

Paige’s team: a cold spot about seven kilometres wide, and rock and dust flung more than a hundred kilometres out. They call it gardening the regolith.

Colosseum is a late mouth. Once-in-a-century is a late mouth if it finishes the looking. Looking is the before-and-after that caught what nobody saw live, and the surface that changed far past the rim.

The leftover is both: the hit that already finished while nobody was looking, and the garden that starts far from the rim — where we still wanted a local event.