Fossils: A Flash Fiction by Joe Kapitan
Fossil me, she says, on a Sunday afternoon when snow strikes and shackles everything tight under its belly.
She larvaes in front of the fireplace, cocooned in quilt.
Explain, I answer, watching the flakefall from my chair, noting that my car has become a tumor beneath thick porcelain skin.
Rediscover me, she says. Search for me, but do your homework first: organize an expedition, hire a local guide, endure hardships, read the strata, hypothesize, then dig. Dig, like nothing else matters.
I’ve loved you for fifteen years, I say. Without Sherpas. Isn’t that expedition?
Long expeditions are deadly, she says, they breed institutions. Discoveries disappear into textbooks.
You want some time away? I ask.
I want to be unearthed again, she says, marveled at, brushed delicately, cradled, magnified, examined, taxonomied, announced at symposiums.
It falls harder, that downy sediment.
Cephalopod or gastropod? I ask her, in that way of mine.
Neither, she says, yawning. Something that flew once, before the sap, and before the amber. A dragonfly, maybe. A careless one.
Ah, no bigger than a grapefruit then, I figure. So how would I find you?
She turns to me. You found me once, she says.
Something in the fire snaps.
We played this game, once:
Me: What’s sadder than a shovel buried?
You: A fossil reburied.
Outside, the lump that had marked my car is no longer visible.
We stop talking, to conserve oxygen.
Author’s Note: This flash fiction piece was first published in Fractured West 3, way back in 2011. Editor Kirsty Logan gushed about it, and it was the encouragement I really needed at that moment.
