Three runaways from a poor woman's kitchen — a straw, a coal, and a bean, each just escaped the fire and the pot — reach a brook with "no bridge or foot-plank", and the straw offers up its own thin body for the crossing. The record's single witness is the Grimms' Household Tales (collected 1812–1857), where the tale runs as The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean. "I will lay myself straight across", says the straw, so that the others may "walk over on me as on a bridge"; it "stretched itself from one bank to the other" and waited. The coal, impetuous, "tripped quite boldly on to the newly-built bridge" — but at midstream, hearing the water rush beneath, it stopped in fear, and there the straw "began to burn, broke in two pieces" and let its passenger fall. The coal "hissed when she got into the water" and died.

So the marvel filed here undoes itself in the telling: a bridge made of the one thing fire will take, thrown across the one thing that will drown it, certain to fail the moment weight and water meet on the span. The bean, safe on the shore, laughs so hard at the sight that it splits its skin, and is saved only by a passing tailor, whose black thread is why "all beans since then have a black seam".

The shelf keeps only this one German tale beneath the address, no wider company wired to it. It is a small, exact fable of a bridge that is also its own kindling — and it leaves a plain question hanging over the water: what is a crossing worth when it is built from the very stuff that fire and current were always going to claim?