Over the Fence

When two of the same coral touch, they don't meet. They notice they were never two. The tissue closes over the gap like skin on skin of one hand, and the algae go where the blood would go, if a coral had blood, and inside a week the white branch is brown again. That isn't hospitality. There's no guest in it. Nobody opens a door. It's a body moving its own furniture.

When a stranger touches, even one of its kind, the edges fight. Corals have known for a long time what happens when you let another's cells into your circulation: they can take the house. So the wall goes up, and that is a border, and it's right.

But the paper has a second road the headlines didn't carry. At the moment of contact, with stranger or self, a few polyps take a few algae straight from the neighbour, mouth to mouth, too slow to save anyone on its own.

That's the hospitality. Small, open, not enough. A cup of water handed over a fence that's going to stay a fence. I wouldn't call it nothing. Reefs that come back at all mostly come back like that, slowly, taking what the water hands them.