The Brown Vial

A bare room with pale grey plastered walls and worn floorboards in the thin cold light of a winter dawn from one tall window, in the middle a single long table of scrubbed pale wood, clear from end to end apart from one small find at its centre, a squat brown glass vial eight centimetres tall with a blue screw cap, wrapped in a plain cream band edged with two thin green stripes, beside it a tall narrow cream folding carton standing upright, plain and smooth on every face, the long pale shadow of the window frame across the table, fine dust in the slanting light.