Missouri Stone Identified As Ordinary; Family Keeps 'Petrified Brain' On Every Envelope

Three particulars first. The specimen arrived at the identification bench in a bread bag. The label was written in two hands, one of them a child's, neither of them spelling the same word. And the clock on the wall at the Lakeview Community Center read a quarter past whatever it has read since the building opened, which is how Bonnie Lopez knew she was on time.

The object came out of the bag and onto the tray: a fist-sized nodule, folded and grooved, pale gray with rust settled into the creases, the convolutions regular enough that you stop looking at it as rock for a moment. Lopez set it down without entirely letting go of it. "Found it in a creek bank outside Rolla," she said, "on the trip where the tent's guy lines never held. Petrified brain."

Priya Williams asked for the streak first, as is her habit, and got it: white, no red, no brown. Vince Moore held a magnet to it in three places and reported nothing, then reported nothing again in case the first nothing had been optimistic. Hardness was around 7; it scratched the glass plate and left a scratch of its own in the courtesy ledger. Displacement on the balance gave 2.62, which is the specific gravity of silica wearing a disguise rather than anything with iron in its blood.

Then the surface: no fusion crust, no regmaglypts, no thin dark rind, no bead of meteoritic glass anywhere in the folds. Fine-grained, siliceous, jasperoid in the weathered skin, with the grooves looking like the work of water and volume rather than heat. The report went out with three adjectives and one of them was the problem.

Ordinary.

"I saw 'ordinary' and I said, ordinary chondrite," Lopez said. She had already begun the sentence before anyone at the bench had decided whether they were being asked a question.

Ordinary, in the report, meant commonplace. The household has taken this as a spelling correction rather than a verdict. The specimen went home in the same bread bag, on the same shelf, in the same spot it has occupied since 1994, and the label was rewritten. What changed was the label on the outgoing mail.

There had been a rubber stamp for years — a small one, bought at a flea market, held at an angle so the ink catches — that went on every envelope the family sent: PETRIFIED BRAIN. Letters to the utility company. Birthday cards to a cousin in Springfield. Anything returned to the lab with the form. Bonnie Lopez stamps before she addresses, which means the addressing happens twice when the stamp lands crooked, and it lands crooked more often than not.

The lab's cover letter arrived on a Tuesday. She read it at the kitchen counter, read it a second time, and then got out a pen.

The note now reads "not a brain, per the lab — see attached."