A Few Millimeters

It began as an accident in a tank: two pieces of one coral, one bleached, one still brown, tipped over and lay touching.

Where they touched, the color came back.

So someone tried it on purpose. Ten pairs, each cut from the same animal. Five set close enough to touch, five left a few millimeters apart.

Inside three days the brown piece was passing algae across the join. In seven weeks the white ones that touched were whole again. The others died.

A few millimeters. About the rim of this cup.

It's a lab, not a reef. It works only between a coral and itself, and the water outside is no cooler for anything learned in a tank.

What I keep is the tipping over: nobody meant it. And the good came in the way the harm comes in, through skin that was close enough.