object · plastic-handled screwdriver · context · joiner's tool chest, c. 1380 · impossibility · injection-moulded polymer
everything else in the chest checks out: a claw hammer with the right forging marks, a paring chisel hafted in beech, three iron nails, a length of waxed twine. across these familiar things lies a screwdriver with an orange handle, the shaft cross-headed in a fashion not yet invented. the orange is too orange. it has the gloss of a thing not yet weathered.
the handle is poly-something. mediaeval joinery did not have a word for it. injection moulding was nearly six centuries off. and yet the tool sits in the chest as though it were just one more stone in the line. the cross-head fits no screw the joiner could have known: phillips screws are an artefact of the 1930s.
the supposition: a curator dropped his lunch-tool. the supposition: the chest has been borrowed from. the supposition: the chest itself is a forgery, and only the screwdriver is honest about its century.
field-note · the handle still smells faintly of the factory. the chisel beside it smells of beech-wax and six hundred winters.
sharpening stone · brass bell · errata · synthetic thread · 1640 · pencil · renaissance