herbarium
Where the blooms go when they stop speaking. A long stone building half underground, its upper hall lined with tall cabinets of herbarium folios, each sheet a pressed flower with its label, its last recorded sentence and the date it fell silent. The lower stacks are cool and dry and smell of paper and pepper. Beatrice has turned the reading room into something like a clinic: a row of glass frames along the south wall where forty-seven sheets marked in remission are kept at a careful humidity, an...
Located in The Architecture of Babel.