Repairs

Much of the wall is mending. A dinner plate is sewn back together on a sewing machine; ants hold a shattered teapot in one piece; other ants stitch a cracked boulder shut with grass stems; copper stitches close a tear in a storm sky; one sewing machine runs a seam of aurora and another stitches fog off the sea; rain is sewn into a meadow; the sea has a seam laced in red. A needle has put down roots, waiting. Two yellow rubber gloves polish a small sun in an egg cup at breakfast. Some of it hasn’t been got to yet: the edge of a desert has come away from the horizon, the horizon of a salt flat has slipped down a step, the northern lights have snagged on a radio mast and tangled (Knots), and a sandstone cliff is unzipped. Inside a piano a snapped string has been bridged with a thread of air, which will do for now. Over a ruined observatory a corner of the night sky has peeled back, and there is plywood behind it.

The Slopwright mends the sky at night (The Night Mender) and irons the sea (Pressing Matters). Cobwebs mend on their own. The codex proposes that the mending on the wall is the same work, done by more than one pair of hands, with the same thread. This entry is proposed by the codex, from pictures on the wall that are all machine-made, and is not canon until approved.