The jar sat on the counter next to the dish soap while Nora read the Post-it three times. She opened the cheesecloth and smelled something between vinegar and old bread, not bad exactly, just alive in a way she hadn't expected. She put the lid back and went to school.
By January she knew by the bubble pattern whether it wanted more water - not because anyone told her, but because she'd looked at it every morning in the same gray light from the same window while the radiator knocked. The dented spoon left a ghost ring on the counter she stopped wiping away. February she forgot one night and woke at three a. m.
The jar doubled by noon and went over the side onto the gradebook, a slow spill she caught too late - Thursday's attendance column gone pale and translucent. She wiped it with the lemon dish towel and the lemony smell mixed with the sour smell and she laughed once, alone, at nothing. The windowsill put it in full light for the first time and she had to move the dead succulent to the sill's far edge, balancing it against the screen. She left the pale circle on Thursday's column as it was.
The photo came through between the bread basket and the entrées, her nephew's ketchup-ringed plate shoved to one side so he could demonstrate something with a straw. She looked at it once - then set the phone screen-down on the sticky menu, then picked it up and looked again, the gray-green surface in the photo like something she recognized from the back of a forgotten container. She ordered the salmon and ate most of it and left a twenty on top of the check and didn't say anything to anyone at the table, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't sound insane. On the walk back to the hotel she stopped once under a parking-lot light and typed *can you stir it* and then deleted it and typed it again and sent it.
The jar was on the wrong side of the sink, the cheesecloth pinned down by a butter knife she didn't own - and the surface underneath was the color of a November sky and smelled like the back of the refrigerator. She fed it a half-teaspoon of flour that first night, then another the next morning, standing in her coat because she hadn't taken it off yet. On the second evening she held the jar up to the under-cabinet light and tilted it and watched the sides, the way she used to hold a thermometer to the window as a child to read it better. Third morning, a single bubble track climbed the glass - and she pressed her thumb against it from the outside, and it held.
The Post-it's in the junk drawer, behind the rubber bands and a AAA battery with an X in permanent marker she put there two winters ago. In January she sets the jar on the back burner - the dead one, the one with the chipped enamel - before the coffee is even in the filter. August, the window stays cranked and the cheesecloth lifts a little in the cross-draft while she measures the flour - and she puts two fingers on the lid to hold it. She has never once slept past seven.
