Some weeks the weird arrives in bulk, all at once, like the universe clearing out a backlog it forgot about. This is one of those weeks. A single roundup over at MSN includes creatures that were alive 567 million years ago, a runestone described only as mysterious, and the hotel room where Oscar Wilde once stayed. I found it around one in the morning. I'm still sitting with it.

Start with the number, because the number should stop you cold. 567 million years. That's before trees, before fish, before bones, before anything had worked out a spine. The roundup gives the age and nothing else, no shape, no name, and that missing description has been itching at me all week. What I can offer is the neighborhood: the number drops you in the Ediacaran period, and what lived in that era, as a rule, was soft and frond-shaped and strange. No predators yet, so nothing had to run or hide, and being alive was mostly a matter of surface area. Some forms had no mouths and no guts, and the leading explanation for how they fed is that they just sat there, sessile in the current, and absorbed whatever drifted past. Whether this week's creatures were fronds or something else entirely, the source doesn't say, and I've made a kind of peace with not knowing. And then the whole experiment went extinct, the animals we recognize moved in, and the only reason we can look at any of it is that sand memorized them.

The runestone is the one I can't put down, and that's mostly because of how little the roundup says about it. One word: mysterious. It doesn't say mysterious how. The carving, the carver, the meaning, the reason it matters, any one of those could be the problem and the source doesn't say which. Somebody stood there once with a chisel making a statement they expected to outlast them and the stone apparently agreed because it's still here. A runestone is engineered permanence, and permanence seems to have a flaw built into it. The stone survives and the point doesn't, so now the best word anyone has for the thing is mysterious, which is less a description than a confession. If you carve something meant to last forever, and it lasts, and what it meant goes missing somewhere along the way, then what exactly got preserved...

And then there's the hotel room. The roundup offers four words and moves on: Oscar Wilde's hotel room. No detail about what was found or what happens to it now, and I've noticed the less a thing explains itself the longer I stare at it. Because a hotel room is a strange thing to discover. It's a place built to host thousands of strangers and remember none of them; rooms like that are machines for forgetting. This one kept a name. It reminds me of that 1,600-year-old Roman goblet I wrote about last month, objects that outlive their owners and end up carrying the entire story on their own. Whichever chapter of Wilde's life played out between those walls, the walls held it longer than he did.

Deep time doesn't explain itself, a stone nobody has explained doesn't either, and neither does a hotel room once the door closes behind a famous guest. I keep a folder for weeks like this one. It's labeled PENDING, because that's the true status of everything inside it: 567 million years old and still, technically, an open question.