Read Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 for Free Online

mold, Bardelon discovered, inside the trumpet of a phonograph, an ancient sodden cracker on which grew a golden, thread-like mildew. Rogers quickly recognized that this mildew, if persuaded to grow thinly enough atop the loaf of bread, would represent perfectly the scant hair of his father's sunburned scalp.
    The resemblance of his father to the loaf, once the rouge grew from the nose and cheeks, the red pipes threaded the eyes, and the sparse hair had sprouted from the sides of the head, was remarkable.
    At first Rogers thought he had found his medium, but soon he became dissatisfied. The mold, although brightly colored, tended toward round colonies, making it suitable for little more than pointillism.
    For a brief period he experimented with propagating amoebas in dyed water, but they proved difficult to train; the collages dissolved within seconds. The paramecium was a more tractable subject, although it was impossible to wedge them closely together, or indeed to breed them in great quantities at all, which left his pictures faint and hard to see except under certain types of light.
    After a year of further experiments, both with algae, which performed adequately but never matched the beauty of what he imagined, and with rotifers, which were too voracious and quickly devoured one another, Rogers found the perfect medium: the bacterium, which ran through generations quickly, allowing easy breeding of brightly colored varieties, and which were in many cases motile.
    Much as an artist will spend hours combing the hairs of her brush to perfection or the writer ensures again and again that his stack of blank paper has straight edges before setting down a single word, Rogers bred and re-bred his bacteria over the course of the next six months without ever daring to paint with them.
    But he could not stall forever. His first painting, in bacteria on a mica flake, was of a thumbnail-sized Garden of Eden. Magnified with a jeweler's loupe, tiny ocelots sprawled on emerald branches, herons stood one-legged around a droplet of a pool, lizards and frogs clung to the undersides of every speck leaf, and Adam and Eve themselves embraced in a glade of sphagnum.
    Only one other man, the painter Arthur Dove, saw the painting while it lived. Dove was sufficiently moved by the miniature to sing its praises to everyone he knew before going back to New York City, and by the time Rogers was ready to show his first large-scale work, a modest buzz had swept the Baltimore art community, and he felt compelled to invite friends and colleagues to the unveiling.
    Rogers had installed two panes of glass, flush against each other, measuring eight feet high by ten wide, into a specially shuttered attic studio. He had then introduced carefully designed cultivars of colored bacteria to the minuscule gap between the panes, bacteria bred to grow and mingle and wiggle into place to form their picture within a strict time-frame.
    He was entertaining the guests downstairs, waiting for the painting to mature, when he heard his apprentice, a local boy named Tom Blake, cry out from above. When Rogers reached the attic, he found the bacteria blooming ahead of schedule, swirling and coiling into their magnificent living replica of a Franklin County field at night. The stars twinkled in feverish animation; the clouds kinked and spiraled as the bacteria glided between the panes of glass; the trees undulated as if rustling in a breeze.
    Matters were only made worse when Blake threw open the shutters, which caused the bacteria to perform as they had been bred to on the introduction of light. This group consumed that one; the next moved to the frame, chasing the other to the corner. Before Rogers's eyes, the starry night dawned, first running awash in rosy ripples, then suffering the curls of indigo sky to be burned away by a languid sun that darkened as it climbed the sky from a pale lemon to a richer shade reminiscent of egg yolk.
    By the time the guests had been notified