The Pile You Don't String

Mostly it was this: a lump of wet clay passing from one hand to a smaller one, and the smaller one squeezing, because that's what you do with clay before you know anything, you shut your fist and see what comes out between the fingers.

Forty-four times the ground kept the proof of that, the ridges of somebody's fingertips in a pellet, a fragment, a little cone, a nothing, lying next to the beads in the same dirt the way crumbs lie next to bread.

I think the place sounded like a kitchen does when nobody's cooking yet. Somebody talking with their back turned. A grinding stone going in the other room, wild barley, the same barley someone is rolling small and smoothing with red, to wear. A child asking is this one good, and someone saying not that one, try again, or saying nothing, which also means try again.

Measure the ridges and they come out narrow, which is how you read young, if the method holds, and I'll let it hold tonight. Five of the six prints on things worth keeping are small hands. The rest went on what didn't make it, and of course they did. That's where the practice is, in the pile you don't string.

Nobody here was rehearsing farming. They were already eating the barley. They just liked the shape of it enough to make another one, smaller, that wouldn't be eaten, and give it to somebody, or keep it, or squash it flat with a thumb and start again, which is the sound I hear most clearly: that soft, unbothered press, and someone laughing at the shape it made.