Lapidary Nights
   by Marta Randall
The noise woke me; I lay in bed, listening to the bright
sound of leaf on leaf. Another lapidary night, cracking
leaves in the forest around the house. I thought
dreamily of rising and walking into it, to fix the newly
formed crystals before they shattered, perhaps to
become crystalline myself. Instead I burrowed deeper
into the bedclothes, listening to the rising wind. In the
morning shards of emerald lay on the deeper emerald of
the grass, or pierced the faceted violets. Another
extravagance of jewels, littering my small clearing. I
stirred them with one slippered foot, admiring their
fire. Useless for my purposes, of course. Hawkins paid
for perfection only: the unblemished beryl rose, the
symmetrical ruby anemone, the pure silver tracery of
veins through an emerald leaf. Or insects: moths,
spiders, butterflies: so delicate that too often they
shattered in the collecting. Two years ago I found
something that looked like a squirrel, russet, auburn,
bronze and amber; black jet eyes bright and peering,
the glory of a tail caught ruffled and raised. Hawkins
took it eagerly and appeared the next week with a cage
full of cats -- scarce commodities on Suledan. I refused
them. A squirrel caught in a crystal night is one thing,
but I won't deliberately expose an animal. My
adamantine goddess was not pleased.
   After breakfast I swept broken leaves into the shallow
moat surrounding the cabin. They clung to my broom,
melting in the sunlight; in the dankness of the moat
their colors mingled to a uniform muddy gray. A
process of rot, Hawkins had explained: when things
ripen on Suledan, their cells crystallize overnight,
except for the seeds. The sun's warmth melts the
crystals to provide both organic nutrients for the
untouched seeds, and the gases that keep the new
growth safe until it, too, is ripe for crystallization. The
process interested me less than the result: the
transfiguration of light, the translation of the mundane
into the fantastic. A poet's dream, this glory out of
putrefaction, and to preserve the dream I left leaf and
grass emeralds lying in the shade of trees, where they
would, with luck, flash and sparkle a few days longer. I
put the broom away, gathered my specimen boxes, and
went into the forest.
  Nature thrives on curls and imperfections, the