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 tumour beneath thick porcelain skin.

Rediscover me, she says. Search for me, but do your homework first: organise an expedition, hire a local guide, endure hardships, read the strata, hypothesise, 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 fatal, she says, they breed institutions. Discoveries disappear into textbooks.

You want some time away? I ask.

I want to be unearthed again, she says, marvelled 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.