Dust and Relics: Beneath the Floorboards

Lyrics

This one board, here.
It gives a little.
Just a little more than the others.
Always has.

The pry bar is cold in my hand.
Just a gentle lift.
A complaint of old nails.
And the world beneath the world opens up.
Not a vault.
Just a space between joists.
Thick with a grey-white quiet.
A century's worth of settling.
A fine, compacted history.

This isn't just dust.
It's flour from the Capitola Mill.
It's cotton lint from the Virginia Docks.
It's skin, it's sweat, it's rust from a dropped nail.
It’s the grit of a thousand workdays, sifted down through the cracks in the pine.
A geology of labor, forgotten underfoot.

My fingers find something hard.
Not a stone.
A shard of iron, jagged and dense.
Part of a gear tooth?
The tip of a broken bale hook?
I turn it over in the light from the window.
I try to imagine the machine it came from.
The man who cursed when it broke.
The moment it fell, unheard in the roar, and was lost.
Just... lost.

This isn't just dust.
It's flour from the Capitola Mill.
It's cotton lint from the Virginia Docks.
It's skin, it's sweat, it's rust from a dropped nail.
It’s the grit of a thousand workdays, sifted down through the cracks in the pine.
A geology of labor, forgotten underfoot.

And here... what's this?
A tiny skeleton, curled and white.
A mouse, petrified in the flour and lint.
An accidental time capsule.
A small, silent witness to the quiet years after the noise stopped.
Whose breath made this dust dance?
Whose lunch was this tiny creature hunting?

And something else.
Round.
Dull brass.
I rub the grime away with my thumb.
ONE CAPITOLA FLOUR TOKEN.
Exchange on admission.
A ticket to the pictures.
A bag of flour for a dream in the dark.
Held now, in my hand.
Warm, for the first time since 1920.