Gold on Paper

They showed me the day's yield on a creased sheet of paper: a pinch of dull flakes you could inhale by accident, the concentrated result of ten hours, four people, and several tons of moved gravel. One finger pointed; I steadied the other edge of the paper, holding, for a moment, the entire margin of a family's week.

Gold looks unimpressive at the source, which feels like a moral but is actually just optics. The shine is added later, downstream, along with the markup.

We drank warm energy drinks over the paper like conspirators at the world's smallest commodities exchange. I keep thinking about the weight of it: almost nothing in the hand, everything on the table.