object · alkaline battery, 1.5v · context · wax tablet, c. 1507 · impossibility · electrolyte chemistry
a clerk's daybook from one of the trade-cities, written in the kind of neat-cursive abbreviation that takes a paleographer a week to settle. the left leaf is a list of bushels. the right leaf is blank except for an alkaline cell embedded a quarter-inch into the wax, terminal-side up, as though the clerk had been melting wax around the battery to keep it.
the wax around the battery has cracked outward in clean radials — heated locally, then re-set. there is no air-bubble that suggests removal. the cell is a standard AA, brand-name worn off, manufactured decades inside the wrong century. its label-band shows traces of a mint-mark that won't be coined for four hundred years. the daybook is not in forger's ink, by any test we have run.
the supposition: a hoaxer in the seventies. the supposition: the cell arrived in a fold of the paper, smuggled through. the supposition: the clerk knew exactly what he was burying.
field-note · voltage tested 1.49v. it has not run down for the duration of its catalogued life with us.
case · inkpot · memory · lacuna · never · aluminum coin