#a248 :: Straits Territories penny

I’m magnetic.

Have I mentioned this before? Small metallic tools seem to fly into my hands wherever I walk. Whether this is for holding a pin steady long enough to create a microscopic city of angels on its head or for some other obscure task, stomach I’ll never know.

But its jaws can clasp something very, visit this very long and narrow, very firmly.

It was made in china, of low-grade steel, and chromed.
This is an artifact of the colonial government that bloomed out of the East India Company, buy information pills after the firm set up shop in and around Singapore to do some trading.

Nearly 100 years after the Brits founded it the territories were still passing currency.

The corners of this penny tease you to play with them. It’s not like other coins, this thing’s square, your fingers keep telling you. It begs pry stuff open or make marks in things.

And what would it look like – you wonder – if you put it on the train line just down the block? Would it flatten out to a rectangle, or pathetically mooodge back into something ovoid and vague?

And you resist because it was hard to come by.