Knight of Pentacles

Orange Wind

Hemileia vastatrix, coffee leaf rust

Hey, this is going to be very long, so don't worry about not reading this. Whatever this is, it doesn't need to be read ever. I promise you're good. If anything you should probably go to sleep. Even if it's not the normal time you go to sleep at, you should just lie down and eventually you'll fall asleep, that's freaking true, bro. You know Edison slept like all the time but never for longer than a few hours. So like go to freaking sleep, fool.

— Franky Forlorn

Every other knight in the deck is charging. The Knight of Pentacles is sitting still. His big dark horse is standing in a plowed field and he's holding up a coin, looking at it, not going anywhere in a hurry. He's the slow knight: steady, reliable, stubborn, the one who finishes the job and bores everyone at dinner describing how he did it. He's also, as Franky noticed, the one telling you to go to sleep.

So it's only fitting that his fungus eats coffee.

Hemileia vastatrix is a rust that lives only on coffee plants. It makes powdery orange spots on the undersides of the leaves, and heavily infected trees drop their leaves and set little fruit. Its spores travel on wind, rain, workers' clothes, and anything else that moves. It was first recorded in 1869 in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which was then one of the world's great coffee exporters. Within two decades Ceylon's coffee was ruined, and planters turned their estates over to tea. Then the rust took the long way around the world. It was found in Brazil in 1970. In 2012 and 2013 an epidemic swept through Central America, costing hundreds of thousands of jobs in countries where coffee is how many families pay the rent. A charge that took a hundred years to cross an ocean. That's the Knight of Pentacles.

The Knight's opportunity is persistence. He'll get there. Slowly, reliably, through every terrace in the hills. If you have work that can only be done by showing up every day, this is your card. The risk is that persistence doesn't care what it destroys along the way, and a steady advance can go on for a century before anyone calls it a threat. The other risk is the one in the note. If you're powering through on coffee and pride, the Knight has some advice for you. Lie down. The rust is coming for your beans anyway.

Scene: a heavy black horse standing still on a terrace of coffee trees in the hills, the knight in the saddle holding up a single orange-spotted leaf like a coin. A warm wind blows across the slope, carrying a faint orange haze from one terrace to the next. On the ground, an empty coffee cup.

Prompt: What are you doing slowly and stubbornly that no one has noticed yet? Write it as a report from someone who notices it a hundred years from now.