The Test Pit

The pit is a square hole a meter deep beside a pillar, with string across it, and nobody is in it. The crew is up in the market. In the wall of the pit: gravel, a bottle cap, the corner of a laminated card.

You climb down a ladder. The fill at the bottom is damp and gray. You press the cube into it with your thumb, to the knuckle, push the fill back with your boot, and climb out to wait.

At four a woman comes down with a bucket and works the floor in strips. Her trowel stops. She lifts out a silver cube and carries it into the shade of the pillar, and in her palm it warms, slowly.

A bearing, says a man with tweezers. She does not answer. She fills in a card. Item: cube, metal. Context: fill, 1.1 m. At Notes she stops, and from the rim you say it: It is colder in the light. She writes it down. She sets it on the sill of the site trailer, half in the sun and half in the shade of the live oak, with the card under it.