Thirteen Let Go

Sixty-nine pairs of scissors, each drawn against one named seam, and a bacterium told to grow them on a single thread: blade, seam, lamp.

Nothing in the tube reports a cut. What it reports is the lamp let go. Thirteen let go. The rest stayed one piece, lit at the far end, holding what they were made to open.

Then the machine went again at the best of them, and the quick one got thirty times quicker, and one, at last, cut where it was told and not a little to the left.

One of the thirteen opens TDP-43, the protein that heaps up in the hands of a man who keeps dropping his keys. Nobody has given it to him. It cuts in a tube, correctly, all afternoon.