Jonathan Thornton
Unknown Winged Things Arranged in ranks, their brilliant colours dulled by dust and time, antennae drooping, legs splayed at unnatural angles. Sylvia still thought they looked like a magnificent army, a regiment of shining soldiers arrayed ready for battle, frozen as in amber. On the bench in front of her: a cup of coffee long since gone cold, a battered copy of Percy Shelley’ s collected poems, and the contents of case XN-76 / 12 / 3 B. One of the beetles closest to her had a crack in its carapace, the delicate gossamer of its wings showing through the burnished shell. She gently tilted the cork towards her, made a note of the specimen number, and wrote a note in the margins of her lab book.
Sylvia brushed crumbs from her lab coat and reached for the coffee. There was a time when she would not have dared to violate the sanctity of the samples lab with food and drink.
When she would have thrown out one of her colleagues for bringing in something so trivial as a book of poetry, especially a book as old and as battered as that. Lice, bedbugs, silverfish – you never knew what could be living in a ratty paperback, all manner of parasites and irritants that could infest any one of her sample boxes or storage draws and strip the contents bare. Ever since the voxsola, they had traded one set of anxieties for another.
Sylvia went through each of the samples in turn, checking that the information on the labels matched up to the notes in her lab book, recording any changes in condition or missing samples. It was simple work, but required one’ s attention, and Sylvia was glad of the distraction, of the pleasing way it casually used up time. Shut in the specimens lab with just her beetles for company; without trying too hard, she could
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