neighbors too intimately linked by accident of enclosure in body of same building before dividing, genus, species, x or y chromosome, on the envelope, first initial, last name, apartment number hallway narrowing each day by all of us touching same banister and leaving behind increasing layers of fingerprints although recently fingerprints are being challenged as a viable method of identification, a nosy neighbor enlists an expert in dactyloscopy to lift the layers left behind; even burns don't destroy a person's original fingerprint pattern: banister as infallible sequential record of identities that walked up and down the stairway that is always valid, with one exception--if one has an injury that destroys a hand's inner epidermis its prints will be permanently obliterated-- could that mean then, in a case where it's known that the fingerprints of a person in question have been obliterated, that the absence of their fingerprints could be used as evidence for their presence? I descend the stairs painfully aware that your double loops, central loops, and whorls are becoming increasingly layered over. perhaps the dactyloscopist could obtain for me your prints from the last time you held the banister, before their sudden disappearance in the record: a fossil of a species becomes suddenly absent in an archeological stratum of earth where it had been present in the previous layer. next