A rod on the screen, resting at the centre of a dial. It has one job: find the nearest water to wherever the reader is standing, anywhere in Great Britain, and pull toward it.
The pull is a distance and a felt direction, nothing more. Close to a named river the Fleet, the Thames the rod says so. Everywhere else it stays quiet on the name, because the map it draws from doesn’t carry one — a stream, a ditch, a culvert under a road, all sensed the same way, all unidentified. The rod trembles harder the closer it gets, and settles when the reader stops moving.
Every reading it takes is kept, a short trace of pulls building down the page as the reader walks.
Work in progress.