Balcony-Sized Metallic Inclusion Reclassified as Common Pyrite After Third Magnet Test

Reading a submission back to the person who filed it is how every meteorite file at this paper begins, and the Estes file took two sittings. The specimen is a quartz grain eleven millimeters across with a bright metallic inclusion about the width of a match head. It arrived on a fourth-floor balcony during a thunderstorm in June. In the dimensions box, Ms. Estes wrote "balcony-sized." She means the photograph was taken on the balcony. The phrase has since climbed into the file header, where it now sits above roughly a match head's worth of pyrite.

Test one was a refrigerator magnet, applied to the inclusion for a full ten seconds. Nothing. Test two was a hand magnet from the club drawer, at Inez Fenn's request for the monthly update. Nothing. The log entry for that attempt reads "specimen showed no attraction, appeared to enjoy the attention anyway." I did not write that line, and when I called to ask, Inez said she hadn't either. It is now in the permanent record.

Otis Vale, who has never met a procedure he wouldn't see to the end, ruled from the standards board that two tests establish a pattern and three establish a record. Test three was his own neodymium puck, kept in a felt sleeve. "Three tests, one protocol, one outcome," Vale told the July meeting. "This is the most thoroughly non-magnetic object we have logged this year, and I want the minutes to reflect that we were thorough."

By then the streak plate had already been requested by the member who requests the streak plate. The inclusion left a greenish-black mark on unglazed porcelain; a second pass from the quartz side left white. Specific gravity, run by displacement on the identification bench, came to 5.0, which is where pyrite lives and a long way from where quartz does. The brass-yellow luster held up under the loupe, too, in that flat, slightly pitted way pyrite has when it is not trying to fool anyone.

Harold Loomis, who shares a house with a committed collector and has become an accidental authority on timing, offered the guidance the file probably needed earlier: "I've learned not to say 'that's just a rock' while the magnet is still in their hand."

Ms. Estes has accepted the classification. The grain is back on the balcony, on the rail, where it gets picked up most evenings. Its origin remains unestablished, lofted by the storm is one possibility, dislodged from the building's own stonework is another, and I have put both in the file rather than choosing. The label now reads "Common pyrite in quartz, balcony provenance, size 11mm," and the phrase "balcony-sized" appears once, in the notes, with a line through it and no replacement offered.

I record the invoice before I accept the purchase story, and there was no invoice here, only a storm, a grain, and three magnets agreeing with each other. She keeps it because it is pleasant to hold.