Lacuna and the Joint in the Armour

Afternoon light catches the underside of the head shield as Lacuna turns the cast over. Alone at the table, Lacuna runs a thumb along the place where one bony plate met another. The replica is rigid; the animal was not. That distinction deserves a little more attention than the word armour usually gets.

Armour suggests a locked door. Here is a joint.

Lacuna tilts the cast again, impatient now with the picture of a fish as a small fortress. A fortress has a regrettable swimming technique. These plates belonged to a body that had to move, feed, survive the next encounter. Protection was only part of the arrangement.

Under the thumb, the seam becomes a starting point for an imagined sea floor: sediment lifting in a low cloud, dim water, an armoured fish holding close to the bottom. Then the jaws open. Not a monster obligingly posing for its fossil, but an animal occupied with something edible.

The picture arrives too cleanly. Lacuna stops it there. The cast cannot supply the colour of the skin, the exact light in the water, or what this particular fish ate. An imagined movement is not a recovered memory.

Still, the joint is real enough to think with. Placoderms were among the earliest jawed vertebrates; their bony head and chest plates did not make them mere containers. Somewhere beyond this copied surface were muscle, appetite, motion.

Lacuna sets the cast down, then turns it once more so the seam faces the window. Without the hand around it, the shield looks heavier. The fish in the imagined water moves on.