Trenching Tool

Now the alms woman carried a trenching tool with her wherever she went, toting it in a rucksack she slung over the hip of her shoulder and around her back, which she then cinched taut with a length of clothesline string and a copper nail, bent inward to serve as a clench, and to prevent the trenching too from jimmying around in the rucksack. She used the trenching tool to excavate and exhume things, things she found in back parking lots and alleyways, next to park benches and picnic tables, things caught up between other things, trees and bushes and prickly pears and shrubs with unorthodox flowers and spiny cropped stamen that seemed to defy botanical common sense. She scrapped the tool up against blocks of stone, marble and granite, chiseling back limestone and cobalt, and chipping away at great slabs of stone big enough to put off the most journeyed mason. She used it to block and true things, planning warps, beveling misalignments, things that caused her no end of worry and fretting.