The Fossil (NaPoWriMo 2019, Day 3 – Digressions)

Would you lay with me? The ossification has been slow but steady. 6 million years of evolution and 100, 000 years of culture have amounted to little more than the bare tip of earth’s scales. Can you see me through this vitrine window? This is not my body. This is a terrarium. Fed by a carmine lake of fire ants. Its salt clouds my vision and floods my dreams. My brain is a mass of tentacles. I’m crawling with insects, yet the sinking of their mandibles only offer up sterile bytes under the whomp and flicker of computer blue light. Go on, tap my screen. But don’t smudge it with your fingerprints. It might identify you, us and what we were, or worse – what we are not. I’m tired of living in this bell jar. Sylvia’s Esther climbed to the roof of her hotel in the sawdust night and performed an Earwicker family striptease, one dead baby at a time, her mind spread out like a dead poet’s sky- her patience etherized on a table. The new science be damned! I’m breaking the glass. This is an emergency.