Picture Jasper

Those are not hills. They are layers of volcanic ash and fine mud that settled in still water, one on top of the next, until silica soaked through and set the stack hard.

The desert scene is quiet years and bad years, seen from the side. Nothing in there was arranged to be looked at.

Aries, nothing has happened for a while and that is the part you cannot stand.

Somebody made a fuss about how quick you were before you were ten. Quick became your name, and you have been defending it ever since.

So the flat stretches feel like proof of something bad. You have left good things at month four because the quiet came. Quiet has always sounded like failure to you.

Every plain layer in there is holding a bright one up.

It is a mudstone. Silica soaked through it until it was hard enough to scratch glass, and now warm water is all it ever needs.

Nothing about the material was precious to start with. The toughness arrived later, from outside, and it stayed.

Taurus, you stopped trusting anything shiny and cheap, and there was a reason for it.

Somebody handed you a very good story once and you repeated it to people you cared about. Then the months after it happened, and you were the one holding it.

You do not talk about that. You check things now, twice, and you take your time, and the people who call you slow have never been made to feel that stupid.

Run it under warm water tonight. It asks for nothing else.

Layer after layer settled in still water, and most of them are stretches when nothing much happened. Ash from one bad year, silt from a wet decade, then nothing, then more.

Read from the bottom up it is a record. Nobody wrote it down and nobody meant it to be read.

Gemini, people see a whole landscape in you and it is mud that sat still for a very long time.

Somebody at that table got bored quickly, and you learned young that the interesting version kept you in the room. The plain one got you nothing.

So now your own bad year is an anecdote with a laugh in it. The unpolished one is still down there, in order, and you have never said it to anybody.

Who would you tell it to first?

A cutter chose the angle. That is the only human part of this stone, one person deciding where to bring the saw down, and a landscape turning up because of where they cut.

Slice it differently and it is a different picture. The layers do not change. The story does.

Cancer, one person decided how your childhood would be told and you have repeated their version since.

You were the one at home who noticed what was coming. You could hear a car door and know what kind of evening it would be. You learned that because you had to.

Nobody thanked you for it, because from outside it looked like nothing at all. It looked like a quiet child being easy to have around.

That was not easy. That was work.

Hold a slab at arm's length and it is a desert with a low horizon. Bring it up to your face and it is mud, ash and a stain of iron.

Both of those are true at once. The distance is doing all the work.

Leo, you are magnificent from across the room and you make sure nobody gets closer than that.

You learned early that if you came in warm the temperature of the whole place changed. So you did it every time, and then it quietly became the job.

There is somebody you keep being fine around. From across a room you look exactly like a person who is doing well. You have never let anyone close enough to check.

Let one person hold it up to their face.

There is no picture in there. There are horizontal bands of silt and ash, and a saw cut, and your eye doing the rest of it without being asked.

The stone is not lying to you. You are just very good at finding a landscape in a stack of bad weather.

Virgo, you have been quietly stacking the same day for four years.

In that house one person was unpredictable, and your work was the one thing in the building that could be done properly. So you did it properly. It changed nothing.

Now it is midnight and you are relabelling a folder. The conversation you owe somebody sits exactly where it has sat since spring. You know which one is which.

The folder was not the thing.

It takes water, handling and years on a shelf without complaint. There is no treatment on it, nothing dyed, nothing filled in.

It is a plain brown rock that got hard and then got noticed. The worth came entirely from somebody choosing to look.

Libra, you have never asked for anything, and the people around you built their lives on that.

There was a house where one person's mood set the weather for everybody else. You got quick at finding the version that kept the room level, and it worked, so you never stopped.

Somebody asks a small ordinary question and you look at their face for the answer. Your own preference is in there. It has not been asked for in years.

Pick the restaurant. Do not explain why.

Every band in there was a season. Ash falling, water going still, mud settling for a hundred years, then something violent, then quiet again.

It kept all of it. Not one layer got thrown out to make the picture nicer.

Scorpio, one bad year is laid down in you as a thin dark band that nobody else can read.

They were probably kind about it. That is why it went in so deep, and you were young enough to take it as a fact about you rather than a fact about their limits.

So you learned to hand people the top few layers and hold the rest. The ones who have seen the whole stack are still here. You keep quietly waiting for them to reconsider.

They are not reconsidering.

Mookaite gets sold under this name, and so does landscape agate. Both are prettier. Neither one is a stack of quiet years.

The real test is boring. The bands have to be parallel and roughly level, and they have to carry on right across the slab.

Sagittarius, you hate still water, and everything in you worth looking at settled while you were sitting still.

Somebody spent your childhood telling you what could go wrong, before you asked, in detail. Care arrived shaped like a fence, so you learned to climb every fence you saw.

You have gone anyway most times, and two or three of those cost you people. Staying felt like being held down, and nobody ever separated staying from being trapped for you.

Some level ground is only level ground.

Turn a slab side on and count the bands. Each thin line is a stretch of time when nothing dramatic happened at all.

The violent layers are the narrow dark ones. Most of the stone is the boring part, and the boring part is what holds it together.

Capricorn, the dull stretches are the part actually holding you together.

If a day did not produce something you file it under wasted. Rest goes there. So do the weeks you spent just keeping a household running.

So does the winter somebody in your family fell apart and you answered the phone every time. There was no result to show for it, so you have never counted it.

Most of the stone is that.

This is not a landscape and it is not a painting. It is silicified mudstone, which means fine grey mud that had liquid silica move through it until it went solid.

The desert only exists because somebody sawed it at that exact angle. Two millimetres over and there is no horizon at all.

Aquarius, the story you tell about your childhood depends entirely on where somebody cut it.

At about thirteen you worked out that if you could explain a group you did not have to risk joining it. It was a good solution then. Nobody has reviewed it since.

So now you can describe the dynamic at any table in one sentence. Then you go home unable to say what you wanted from the night. People call that insight.

Let somebody else choose the angle for once.

It survives everything an ordinary life throws at it. Warm water, a shelf, a coat pocket, years of handling, none of it marks the stone.

The softness was all at the start, when it was still mud settling in still water. The hardness arrived afterwards, from something soaking in.

Pisces, your quiet years and your bad years are stacked in you in the order they happened.

Somebody in that house had to be tracked, and you learned to read a mood before it was spoken, because knowing early was the only defence a child had.

The tracking never turned off. You come out of an ordinary Tuesday carrying three other people's afternoons. When somebody asks, you say you are just tired.

The mud came first. The hardness came after. That order is not a failing.