small glass bottle · no cork · empty
no. 10 · bf-coll.
picked up by you with the small flinch of having been hoping. lifted: empty. tilted: a thumb's-worth of fine sand and one whitened stem of weed. no cork. no rolled paper. no letter.
about ninety grams. the glass scuffed to translucence on the base where it spent the last summer rolling. the colour of shallow water over a sandy bottom, seen from above on a calm day. closer in office to a shell than to a real message from anywhere.
for now it lives on the bookshelf, neck pointed at the window. you keep meaning to write the missing letter and put it in. you do not, for the same reason no one wrote one to put in it in the first place: the bottle was always the message.
field-note — set against the lamp the small grain of sand inside makes a planet of itself, slow on the inside of a slower world.