Bumblebee Jasper

This one is quietly falling apart while it sits there. Leave it in sun and the orange breaks down and crumbles to powder.

A copper coin marks it. It is not jasper, whatever the label said, and the yellow bands are arsenic minerals.

Aries, the fastest thing in the room is usually the one that hurts somebody, and lately that has been your mouth.

Somebody at home lit up when you came in with news. You learned to always have some, because standing still felt like disappearing.

Now the flat stretch in the middle of a good thing reads to you as a mistake. It is not a mistake. It is the part nobody watches.

Keep it in a closed box. Stay one more month.

It grew in a volcanic vent on Papandayan, in West Java, where hot gas came up through rock for a very long time. Sulphur settled out with arsenic minerals and carbonate, in bright soft bands.

None of that was gentle. The brightest part of it is the part that would poison you if you soaked it and drank the water.

Taurus, you stopped trusting anything that arrived cheap and beautiful, because one thing did and it cost you.

They were generous fast and gone faster. You were young enough that it rewired how you read a warm first week.

Now everyone gets two years of quiet checks before you unclench. The honest ones sometimes leave before the checks are done.

Bright and safe are two separate questions.

Most pieces you will see have been soaked in resin to hold them together. Without that they are too soft and too crumbly to carve.

The resin does not remove the arsenic. It only makes a hazardous rock look finished, and the tag still says jasper, which it is not.

Gemini, you are very funny about the exact things that are hurting you.

In your house the honest sentence made the evening worse. So you got funny, because funny never got anybody shouted at.

Now you hand people the polished version of your year and they take it. You are excellent company and nobody there knows a thing.

The sealed version is not the whole rock.

Put it under a lamp and look at the yellow. That colour is realgar, an arsenic mineral, and light is slowly turning it into orange dust.

Nothing dramatic is happening to it. It is a bright windowsill and a few quiet years, which is all it takes.

Cancer, the brightest thing about you is the part being quietly used up, and you have told nobody.

Somebody at your table needed you calm, so you were calm at eight, and nobody ever revisited that arrangement. Being fine became the thing they counted on.

Now you hold up through the worst month and then go under on a Thursday over nothing at all.

What has been on your sill for years?

It is not jasper. It is a soft banded rock of carbonate and sulphur with arsenic minerals in the yellow, and a steel knife will scratch it.

Real jasper is hard enough to scratch glass. This one is three to five, which means somebody named it after the thing it is not.

Leo, the brightest thing about you is the part people keep warning you about.

You were the bright one at home. Someone there was not okay, and a cheerful child kept the house from tipping, so you took that job at seven.

Now you can tell a friend is struggling from the shape of one message. Nobody has read your face like that in months.

Loud is not the same as dangerous.

It cannot be soaked or salted, and it cannot be left in the sun. Dry-wipe only, in a closed box, away from children and pets.

That list is not fussiness. It is arsenic, and the hazard is dust and swallowing and water, never a sealed piece held in your hand.

Virgo, you learned early that a beautiful thing can still hurt you, and you have been checking ever since.

The cupboard gets emptied at midnight. The list gets rewritten neater. Underneath it all is one thing with no fix that you have known about since spring.

You learned early that a child who caused no trouble got left in peace. Clever then. Unpaid now.

Some things are only handled carefully.

Hot gas rose through a volcano in Java for a long stretch of time and left these bands behind. Yellow and orange and black, laid down slowly, none of it stable.

The bright parts are the least stable parts. Realgar gives up under light and turns to powder, which is the price of that colour.

Libra, the calm you show people is the least stable thing about you.

One person's mood set the temperature of your childhood house. You got good at lowering yourself so nobody else had to move.

Now you can name what everyone else wants in a second. Somebody asks what you want and the blank arrives instead.

What would you say if nobody had to be managed?

Somebody carved this and sealed it in resin so it would hold together on a shelf. Then somebody else printed jasper on the label, which it has never been.

The arsenic is still in there. Sealed and polished it is safe to hold, and nobody selling it explains where that line sits.

Scorpio, you are done shrinking so a room stays comfortable, and it took you years to get here.

You spent your teens reading the temperature and adjusting before anyone asked. Somebody told you once you were too much, and you filed it as a fact about you.

Now you know it was a fact about them. That arrived late, and it cost you a decade of holding your own volume down.

Loud is not the same as dangerous.

Look at the yellow. Neon, almost artificial, running in bands through grey and black, and all of it entirely natural.

Do not sand it or drill it dry. Do not lick it. The dust is arsenic, and this is one warning that is not marketing.

Sagittarius, the brightest thing about you is the part people should handle carefully, and you never warn them.

You were told no about a hundred harmless things as a kid. So many were wrong that you stopped sorting them. You binned the whole category.

Now be careful lands on you as be smaller. You go anyway, and this is the one to actually listen to.

Not every warning was a leash. This one is about the rock.

It is not jasper and it never was. It is a soft rock of carbonate and sulphur, and the famous yellow is an arsenic mineral called realgar.

The name was chosen to sell it. Somebody decided the true description was a worse product than the borrowed one.

Capricorn, you learned that the true description of you was a harder sell, so you stopped giving it.

A day that made nothing goes in the wasted pile. So does rest. So does the year you spent keeping a household upright while everyone assumed you were fine.

At home nobody said well done for the invisible parts. You took them off your own list, and you have kept them off it since.

The stone is still mostly quiet bands.

It survives being held and not much else. Water takes it. Salt takes it, and light slowly turns the orange into dust.

The hazard is not the holding. It is dust and swallowing and soaking, which is why polished sealed pieces are fine and raw chipped ones are not.

Aquarius, you are safe to be near and you know exactly which questions would take you apart.

You explained your family to itself as a child and got called cold for being right. So you moved back a step, because the back of the room was where nothing landed on you.

Now you can name what everybody needs. You still cannot say I want this without a footnote attached.

What would the plain sentence be?

Hot gas came up through a Javanese volcano and left these bands behind, one bright layer at a time. It took as long as it took and nobody was watching.

What it laid down is beautiful and partly poisonous. Arsenic minerals make the yellow, and no amount of polish changes that.

Pisces, the brightest thing about you is also the part that has been quietly costing you.

One adult's mood filled your whole childhood house. You had to know it before it walked in, so you got very good at feeling everything early.

Now you take a stranger's bad afternoon home. You cannot find where you picked it up, and people call that sensitivity.

Wipe it dry. Put it away. Wash your hands.