not an insect proper, but kept here for convenience and because the colony refuses to be filed elsewhere. the paper bear is a small mite that lives on the upper third of any page that has not been turned for more than a season. it does not eat the page. it drinks the breath the reader has left on it.
under water it walks; under drought it folds itself into a tun the size of a comma and waits, occasionally for decades. you may have already revived a colony. it is the small warm patch you sometimes feel when reopening an old library book.
they tolerate frost and the vacuum between the leaves of a palimpsest. they decline only the press of an attentive bookworm proper, with which they have an old quarrel.
— wet the corner of the page. by the eighth minute a soft creature had unfolded and looked, briefly, at me. — j.r.