The Urchins

The evidence is a sieve. Grey clay from the Gram pit in Denmark, washed, and picked under a microscope: plates smaller than rice, what is left of brittle stars nine and a half million years ago.

They turned up only by the whale. Three samples from beside the jaw. None from the same layer farther off.

You ask what anyone would ask. Did a current heap them there? Does ground beside a carcass simply keep things better?

What answers is the urchins: fragments the same size, the same calcite, in every sample, near the bones and far from them.

The stars, they think, were ordinary, from the plain floor round about. They came because there was something.

And the urchins, who were everywhere, are how we know they came.