---

---

 

We fill up on deep-fried bricks of cheese and rib eyes big as our heads at Burly’s Roughrider Bar & Steakhouse. Our neatly laced Merrells and moisture-wicking Patagonias set us apart from the mud-splattered, steel-toed boots under most every table. Ten-gallon hats, blue jeans, thick drawls and thicker steaks. Our noses are white from the amount of sunscreen we shellacked on our faces that morning. Their noses turn up at us, first, but I think it must be a reflex, like how a snake flips to show you its yellow belly. When they speak it’s all niceties, howdies, whereabouts-you-froms.

Lionel tells our waitress we’re newlyweds from Bozeman but that’s a bald-faced lie. One: We’re not married. Two: He’s an Oregonian, and I’m one of those born-in-a-holler, schooled-in-a-pretty-West-coast-suburb types. I usually say, “one of the Virginias.” I suspect nobody actually cares where you’re from out here in Belfield, North Dakota. All that’s relevant is that you’re not from here, so you must be a tourist bound for the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It’s ten or so miles west on the 94.

“I want to see bison,” I beg as Lionel licks the last of the grease from his thumbs.

“A big male buffalo’d stampede your head in,” he says. “You’d have to stay in the truck. Wouldn’t be the real deal.”

“There are no buffalo outside of the park. How am I going to have my Pocahontas moment?”

“Careful, June. The real story of Pocahontas is something brutal.”

“How do you mean?”

He doesn’t answer, but his pitying look tells me how naïve he thinks I am. The waitress comes back with a dish of vanilla ice cream topped with fat slabs of fudge, and says, “On the house, for the newlyweds.”

I can’t help myself—I grin so big I feel my teeth go dry. I look at Lionel and for just a second, it seems possible: the two of us, honeymooners passing through the Wild West, on our way to dig up the world. Vows twining us. Dust exhaling under us. I want to sigh and push the mop of salt-and-pepper hair off his forehead like a new wife might. I stop myself. I’d only embarrass him.

He shoves a spoonful of ice cream between his lips. His sticky fingers grope for mine, then relax as the waitress turns her back.

---

Three o’clock, we cruise past the main entrance to Theodore Roosevelt. The badlands extend like a shadow box, layers of orange and red plateau foregrounding the purples and tans of the grasslands. I tug Lionel’s sleeve at the sight of a herd of pronghorn grazing on a cliff. I sing loud and obnoxious, “Oh-OH-the antelope roooaamm,” and though I don’t think those are the lyrics I do my best to piece together “Home on the Range.” I want this to be a memory for us. We have so few that aren’t behind closed doors.

We turn off the main highway onto a gravel road that peels through ranches. Acres of flat pasture stretch out like a manicured purgatory, set against the dramatic valleys and teetering rock formations of the badlands. Black steer chew cud close to barbed wire fences. After what feels like ages, Lionel parks us off-road by a gate. While he unloads our gear from the bed, I trail around front. The truck’s grill is crammed with the paintbrush-bright wings and creaking legs of a hundred-something grasshoppers. I flick one that hasn’t been totally smushed free and it cree-cree-crees over the fence and into the weeds. I smile. I can almost hear my mother’s voice calling me back to the porch—“Junebug!”—like she did whenever I chased creepy-crawlies in the fields behind her house in West Virginia.

Lionel hands me my pack and a headlamp. A nearby cow moans. I shove the headlamp into the bag’s side pocket—the sun’s full in the sky yet—and hoist the straps over my shoulders before marching after Lionel. The fence swings up with the release of a latch, and we set off through short green grasses, chomped to the soil. 

“This private property, then?” I ask.

“Belongs to a rancher named Simon.”

“Let me guess. Not his real name?”

Lionel shrugs. “Maybe he’s taken steps to protect himself.”

“I would too, if I found what he thinks he found on my own land.”

“Not on his land—just off it, actually. It would make our jobs a hell of a lot easier if he owned it outright. No, the actual site is managed by the US Forest Service, but occasionally his cows get through the fence. That’s how he found it.”

We’re quiet for a spell. I focus on fending flying insects off my face and keeping my boots out of cow pies. We must have trudged a mile and then some when Lionel stops and squints. I don’t realize how much I’m sweating until a droplet plunks off the tip of my nose. Up ahead, the land bowls a bit, the grass gives way to vermillion and sulfur-colored rock. A man is waiting by another wire fence, a baseball cap with an oversized brim shadowing his face. 

“Dallas?” Lionel says.

“You’re late.” 

“Had to eat. Can’t recommend the rib eye at Burly’s enough.”

Dallas isn’t my kind of people. I’ve worked with him only once, in Montana, but it was enough to gather that he’s not got a single conversation-starter in his repertoire. He’s got a neck tattoo, a crucifix encased with pricker branches, and when I asked him what it meant he huffed, “Jesus.” Lionel implied once that Dallas had ties to the Cowboy Mafia so that I should be very nice to him. I doubt this very much, because in my head no mobster could be so boring.

With a shovel, Dallas bends the top wire of the fence so that we can step over it. He leads us past three thin spires of rock, each about my height, squat on the tops like the hats of mushrooms. “Those are called hoodoos,” Lionel says. He’s always teaching me something. “Different hardnesses of rock stacked atop each other, whittled by erosion.”

“And those are cannonball concretions,” I pipe up before he can say more. I’m no student anymore. I nod to the perfect round boulders that litter the ground. “Minerals in the water trap and form them like pearls in a clam.”

Lionel smirks. “Very good. And that’s—”

“That’s your product,” Dallas interrupts.

We stop short before a butte. At the base of its crumbling yolk-yellow wall is a tarp stretched flat. Dallas yanks on its corner, ever a magician with a trick. 

Lionel lets out a little squeak. I drop my pack and fall to my knees.

Cresting just above the soil, the beginnings of a column of vertebrae. Mahogany in color, and broad as the circumference of Dallas’s barrel chest at its widest point. I press my palm to the stone that was once bone. My fingers don’t even reach its edges. It’s cool to the touch. “Hell,” I breathe.

“What do we say?” Dallas asks. “Is it the real deal?”

“Hell,” Lionel echoes. “It’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen. It’s Mosasaurus.”

---

Has it really been three years since I sat in the back of Lionel’s Paleontology Field and Museum Methods course? Back then, I knew him as Dr. Roderick. I was twenty-one, had just installed a fresh set of eyelash extensions to my lids, and hadn’t yet decided on my major. I remember his first lecture: he said that ninety-five percent of the fossil specimens hoarded by museums are never put on display. They sit in storage, packed with foam and imprisoned between slats of plywood. I went up to him after class and told him I thought it was very sad, that a dinosaur could be the earth’s secret for a million odd years, and then a museum’s secret for hundreds more. Beautiful things shouldn’t be hidden away. I fluttered my new silk eyelashes. He looked at me funny, and I suppose it was then that I realized he was beautiful. He had a ring on his finger and twenty years on me, but I knew we’d look awful pretty together.

All this is to say that, of course, there’s money in what he and I do. And the money’s good. But we’re about getting bones into the hands of people who appreciate beauty. Any bozo with a shovel and a pickaxe can “excavate” a fossil and turn a profit on it. But we offer a professional service. We’re discreet. We take care to unearth, prepare, and protect our specimens before they go to private auction. The megarich always need conversation pieces for their new summer mansions. Chances are conversation pieces aren’t being dug up on overgrazed ranches. Isopods, ammonites, trilobites don’t scream status quite like articulated mosasaurus skeletons hanging in solariums. Those are the pieces you’re likely to find on government land, where their private collection and sale is very much illegal. That’s where we come in. The rancher who discovered it will get a cut, Dallas and his smugglers will get a cut, and Lionel and I will buy nice hotel rooms and even nicer steak dinners.

---

It’s immediately clear that this mosasaur is larger and perhaps more complete than any other specimen we’ve dealt with. I decide she needs a name. I combine my name, June, with Lionel’s. Loon. There’s not much a seventy-million-year-old sea monster sleeping under the dust of North Dakota has in common with the slight and sleek-necked loons of my childhood dipping-ponds. But the name softens her, makes her something shared—like a child, or an odd pet.

“I reckon she was as good a swimmer as any loon,” Lionel says. “But unlike birds, which are dinosaurs, mosasaurs were marine reptiles. Sea levels were rising, and tiny shore lizards adapted to the saltwater. By the end of the Cretaceous, they were these massive apex predators of the earth’s oceans. It’s like they turned back the evolutionary clock.”

“Maybe one day we’ll all return to sea,” I muse.

The sun is plummeting fast. The sky is so big out here that it looks like we’re capped by a vast dome of pink and satin clouds. We strap our headlamps over our ears preemptively. Dallas tells us that the rancher has his security cameras set to turn back on at midnight, so we’d best be cleared out by then. It’s not much time but it’s enough to figure out what we’re dealing with and make plans.

As soon as Dallas leaves, we set to work. Three vertebrae are visible. I kneel at one end and Lionel unpacks his tools at the other. I use a rock hammer and a thick-bristled brush to remove the fragile shale mix from around the bone. My heart flips a bit when the brush strikes a dense and irregular patch in the ground. I dust away more matrix, and there—another protruding vertebral body. 

“It’s like she’s begging to be found,” I say.

Lionel peers at my find. “Remarkable preservation. The neural spine and chevron are unmistakable.”

We are one artist in this task: his hands house the pick and awl and mine the stout brush. Soon a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh vertebrae wink up at us. It doesn’t take much to reveal them. Sunset leaks over our shoulders, and the deep wooden color of the bones becomes bloody and bright. Far off, a lone coyote shrieks, which sets off a layered chorus of yip-yip-yips.

Lionel stands and admires our work. He maps the curve of the spine with his pointer finger. “The articulation suggests it was coiled up at death. An extremely rare taphonomic preservation.”

I grin up at him. “I bet she’s all there, every bit of her.”

“Could be. Remnants of dorsals, pectorals, possibly even a skull based on this trajectory. Mother of god, June. Do you know what this means?”

I rub my thumbs and forefingers together, matching the strumming of the grasshoppers.

---

That night, as we’re having sex in our Airbnb, Lionel exalts the mosasaur between thrusts. 

“It must!”

“Be over!”

“Eighteen meters!”

“The largest on record!”

“Isn’t even!”

“Fifteen meters!”

“This is my!”

“Career-defining!”

“Discovery—AH!” 

He slips off me and rolls onto his side, back heaving. I map the curve of his spine with my pointer finger. His skin is rough with moles and ingrown hairs. I suppose everyone is a little ugly when you look at them this close-up. I think of the skin of the mosasaur, which would have been smooth and scaled, like a snake’s. It’s difficult to imagine her having any aesthetic flaws. In my mind, each scale is a perfect silver rhomboid, tightly keeled. 

Lionel’s heavy breathing turns to snoring. I get up to use the bathroom. On my way, I catch a glimpse of the full moon through the window. How plump it must have seemed hanging over an inland sea. How brilliant its reflection on the open water. I feel as if I could reach out, my fingers puncturing the milky film of moonbeam, and cup the ocean in my palm.

My mother used to say that the valley she raised me in was a “thin place.” She inherited the superstition from withering Celtic roots, ancestors who must have thought Appalachia was a place where the veil between the physical world and other world was threadbare. I could buy it. It’s easy to encounter the divine tucked in the cradle of the mountains, thick with hickories, dogwoods, redbuds. It’s like sliding through a portal.

I decide right then to draw a bath. The tiles sweat and the air fills with sweet steam. I slide all the way underneath the water and open my eyes to stinging, silt-swirling, lubricant light.

---

That first day we pretended to be newlyweds, and everything—the cowpats, the sweat on our brows, the shale shifting beneath our boots—glittered a bit. The next day, it’s as if we return to being professor and student, and the cowpats are swampy piles of shit, the sweat pelting rain, the shale rapidly eroding mud. Rainstorms are rare but not unheard of in North Dakota. The clerk at the gas station said that they were liable to get one good devil-beating-his-wife thunder spat each summer, and after that it could be dry for months. 

The windshield wipers work overtime as Lionel speaks on the phone. I watch his knuckles go white over the steering wheel. 

“Yeah. Yeah. It’s far from ideal. Well, can you get him to change his timeline? Even without the rain, we’re looking at a month of work. Yes, I said a month. Okay. Right. I’m not trying to—” He pauses for a long while, the corner of his lip catching on his tooth. I hear Dallas’s unintelligible grumble through the earpiece.

“Easily. Seven figures. Alright. We’re on it.” He hangs up the phone.

“We can’t dig in this,” I say. “Our equipment, the grids—”

“I don’t want to hear it from you,” he snaps. The tendon in his neck is so tense it looks like it could snap. “Get your gear.”

The trudge to the site feels longer this time around. Each rain droplet is a finger prodding through the thin material of my jacket. By the time we get to the site and set up the tent to protect our work, I’m the kind of soaked that there’s no coming back from. 

But Loon—Loon’s still there. The rain has done some of the excavating for us. Water pools around the cleft of what might be a clavicle. For the first time in millennia, she’s swimming. I take a small comfort in that. From five until midnight, Lionel and I work with only a few words passing between us. The feeling of my socks sticking between my toes takes me right back to hot summer storms in West Virginia, rushing into the kitchen to peel off every article of clothing, standing naked in front of the grease-coated open stove to bake the blood back into my pallid skin. My mother drinking bourbon at the sawbuck table, saying, “That thunder’ll rattle your teeth out, Junebug.”

We find our first tooth on the third day of storms. Loose at the bottom of a puddle, expectant. It’s long as my wrist to the tip of my middle finger, cone-like, with a robust root. I cup it in the water and show it to Lionel. His face is streaked with rain. He looks so much older than he’s ever looked before. “Mark and photograph the location” is all he says. The thunder rattles.

---

By the fourth day, the rain slows to a trickle. On the fifth day, the sky is clear as an agate and the earth smells of musk. Day six, Dallas is waiting for us at the site with three other men. 

I watch as he flips an oily nugget of tobacco over and under his tongue. “These are my cousins. Buck, Colt, Wade,” he says. “We’ve got a problem. We need deliverables in under three weeks.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Lionel says.

“If you can’t do it, we’ll find someone who can.”

“No—no, I mean, we can do it. It’s just—”

“Alright. Here’s Buck, Colt, Wade. Put them to use.”

It’s my job to train Buck, Colt, Wade on the delicate task of exposing and cleaning fossils. Lionel is little help, preoccupied as he is applying consolidants to the smaller, more fragile bones to keep them from crumbling when the time for extraction comes. I fit the picks, awls, and brushes into their hot-dog-sized fingers and assign them to sections of the exposed skeleton. Every five minutes I’m at one of their sides, easing their wrists from prying too aggressively into the bone, or showing them, gently, that the obstruction they’ve been brushing at is in fact a pebble and not a phalange. It makes work very slow, and very tiresome, and I’m a minute away from ripping the brush out of Buck, Colt, Wade’s hand when one of them—who knows which—raises a pinky finger.

“This ain’t a pebble, boss.”

And it’s not. It’s the parietal of a skull. It’s the angular of a jaw. It’s only a glimpse, but it’s enough for me to picture the rest of Loon’s head, just below the surface, long as a grand piano, eye sockets broad and empty, mouth slightly parted. I kiss Buck, Colt, Wade sloppily on the cheek and shriek with delight. Lionel doesn’t notice. He’s on his phone. He’s pissed about something.

---

Hand to god, how Lionel and I got together wasn’t so bad. By then, I had already graduated, so no one could accuse me of sleeping with the prof for an A. It just happened that I found myself in possession of a freshly minted geology degree, in danger of moving back in with my mother for my lack of job prospects. I decided graduate school was the only thing that could save me from another year curled on a twin bed in her stinkbug-infested attic. I dreaded the thought of settling into a life of longing like hers, bitter in my holler. So I sent an email to Dr. Roderick—one of those, “hey, do you remember me? I worshipped you junior year, so please throw me a bone” letter of recommendation requests. His reply:

June,

Of course I remember you. I hope you take this with the best intentions, but don’t go to grad school.

Academia will suck you dry. These days, it stifles the most crucial part of the scientific process: discovery.

You don’t need more theory. You need boots on the ground, fingers in the dirt.

Realizing fully this might mean little coming from an old institution fart like me. It’s rough out there. If you’re looking to make a little money, I have a dig I could use some help on. The details are need-to-know, but we could meet over coffee to discuss? Yes?

Yours, 

Lionel (seriously, just Lionel)

The coffee turned into drinks at a cocktail bar called, conveniently, The Teacher’s Lounge. Dr. Roderick turned into just-Lionel, a sweet-talking if not sleep-deprived man who liked to hike with his dog in his free time and lobby for local Green Party candidates. His pesky marriage turned into a naked ring finger, a left hand entwined with my own across the table.

He said, “You know something most don’t. You know that there is life after death.”

I begged to differ. Major Abrahamic religions, Buddhists, fire-worshipping cavemen begged to differ.

“No,” he said. “Theirs is mere belief. You know. Life after death doesn’t care what kind of life you led. Everyone has the potential to live on in a slab of travertine, under a peat bog, on an ice sheet. Man, reptile, protozoa, asshole, saint.” He looked at me with full gray eyes. “You know this.”

Was I to say that no, actually, I was twenty-two and I didn’t know anything? That’s not how this works. You sit across from the man who graded your papers and you believe him when he tells you that you’re special. You agree to accompany him on a dig in Montana on BLM land that doesn’t seem entirely aboveboard but pays more digits than you’ve ever seen on a check in your life. You agree to go back to his town house, to drink whiskey sours from crystal glasses embossed with the same italicized dates: 5–27–06. You try not to think about how in ’06 you were six. That takes all the fun out of it.

---

I imagine the mosasaur in her prime as I apply molding compound to her skull. The salt doesn’t sting her eyes when she opens them. The sound of thousands of tons of water pressing in from all sides tickles her ears. With a flick of her muscled tail, she propels through a school of silvery fish. They scatter and regroup. The light is rabid with the tint of a stormy sky, but it still dances in sparkling columns.

I trowel away the surrounding matrix. I follow her vertebral column’s path deeper into the rock layer. She, in turn, scans the shallow sea with bright eyes. She feels the slight vibrations of the other living creatures through the loll of the current. Large as she is, her movements are dainty, and her coloring allows her to ebb into shadows.

I excavate around and under the bones until each vertebra is pedestaled like a rare stone. She spots a sea turtle, grazing on the vegetation near the surface. Thoughts race with the anticipation of the initial crunch before the taste of meat. She launches, jaws wide open, and breaches the surface, shell flat in mouth. Teeth sinking, belly slapping, storm raging, blood so very sweet.

I drape wet paper towels over the pedestaled bones. I fit them with plaster field jackets. At twenty-four, I am in my prime, so they tell me. My eyes sting with silt. The sounds of shale and metal clinking, plaster scraping, grind raw in my ears. My muscles ache from days of repetitive, hunching movements. For the first time, the doubt flits through my head: Why am I here? But: I am in my prime. These are the years. And I wanted this. I wanted him.

It’s strange, though. I reckon I know what it feels like to be nothing but my skeleton.

---

After a hot night of digging, I don’t want to sleep. I want Lionel to take me out to breakfast. I tell him it’s not silly or unnecessary. I want to have a chair pulled out for me and a cloth napkin folded on my lap. I want him to order biscuits and gravy for me, hold my hand across the table, and want to be seen with me, like that first night at the steakhouse. I want us to look pretty. We need more memories, I tell him.

But Lionel’s too beat to eat out. His jaw is trembly, like he’s on the verge of tears. I let it go and rustle up cornbread and beans in the rental’s kitchenette without the usual ham hock. He only takes a few bites. 

I don’t know why, but I start telling Lionel about my family. He’s never asked, but I feel this compulsion for him to know every nook of me. I tell him that my folks never gave me anything pretty or decent to model. My mother had a foul mouth and was always tired, but she was kind and smelled like peaches. My daddy left when I was nine to shack up with another waitress who worked with my mother at the diner. I don’t think he ever left town, but I’d only see him every other month or so when he’d take me to Burger King for kids meals and Whoppers. He’d tell me excitedly about his new fiancée and the baby they were expecting and the promotion he got at the John Deere dealership. Then I’d go home and my mother would say, That’s nice, but did you remind him he’s gotta sign his papers? He’s out there tryin’ to cook eggs when the pan ain’t even hot.

“What about you?” I ask Lionel, thinking he’ll tell me about a time when he was a kid and adults disappointed him too. He’s lying on the bed, eyelids sagging.

“Well, I have a kid,” he says. “She’s eighteen. She plays the flute. Her name is Georgina, but we call her Goldie.”

Every day after that, I can’t get Goldie’s name out of my head. With my fingers wrapped around fine metacarpal bones I think about Goldie blowing into the body of her flute, cheeks puffed, condensation glistening on the metal mouthpiece. With my fingers wrapped up in Lionel’s hair I think about Goldie sitting on her father’s lap, reading from The Dinosaur Book. How many flute recitals did Lional attend? How many digs did Lionel invite her to? How many memories did he make for her?

---

Two more weeks of sweat and plaster, working through the nights, breaking down the tents and setting everything up over again the next day to avoid the notice of rangers or cameras. Two more weeks of holding my pee for six hours because every second is precious extraction time and while Lionel, Dallas, and the holy trinity of Buck, Colt, Wade lean up against a butte and let it stream, there are no bushes big enough for me to squat behind. Two weeks more, and by the end of it Lionel is still stiff and growly, shirking away to argue on the phone for hours. Piece by piece we lift Loon from her seventy-million-year-old bed and load her into the white transport van, but Lionel misses most of it. It’s me directing the Cowboy Mafia on proper handling technique. Half her spine is packed away and all of her leg bones are jacketed when Lionel returns from his truck and says it’s time to call it a night.

While Lionel’s driving us back to the Airbnb, I pick a fight.

“Why am I even here, Lionel? Who were you on the phone with all day?”

He says everyone and no one. They all want something from him. 

Big bag of bull.

“That’s not going to work with me. I’m a part of this too. Lionel? I’m here! I’m here.”

He slams on the brakes and dust billows, blotting out the stars and the waning moon. He cuts off the headlights and turns to me, lower lip red from biting down on it. “You seriously think this is about you? Isn’t that just typical for your generation. Me, me, me. Have you ever thought I didn’t want to drag you into my business?” 

“Your business? You mean, your career-defining discovery? You know your name won’t be attached to this dig. Neither will mine. But I’m risking everything to be here with you, and you think I shouldn’t be concerned?”

His expression droops. He smears the loose skin of his temple with his palm. “Baby, I’m in trouble.”

I wait.

“I didn’t want you to see me like this. Once this fossil goes to auction, it’s going to sell for two, three mil. I know it. But when everything gets split, it’s not going to be enough. I need your help. I need your cut.”

Still waiting.

“Listen, I’ll make it up to you, no question. You’ll be taken care of. But right now, I’m underwater. These lawyer fees, my ex dragging me for every penny I have—I had to borrow from some scary fucking people to keep things afloat. I’ll be forced to declare bankruptcy. Do you really want me to lose my house? Lose everything?”

I wait again, then say, “You’re not even divorced?”

Right then, I want to sock myself in the belly. I figure it is the least I deserve for blindly believing that my loving has had no collateral. For trusting him when he said that I needed boots on the ground, fingers in the dirt. My fingernails are half mooned with pale silt. My lover is half married. Our fossil is half excavated. And he is the one underwater, out here, in the heart of this dried-up sea. I should feel something. 

He shrugs. “Is that all you care about? It’s a long, bloodsucking process. Baby, please. Please, Junebug. I love you. I’m doing this for us.”

I don’t recall ever giving him that name—my mother’s name for me. Hearing it makes me feel stripped bare, completely exposed. By now he’s got his hand on my knee, gripping so hard it’s cutting off the circulation. My foot’s gone numb. I can’t feel a thing. I suddenly become very aware of the fact that we are parked in the dark on a dirt road, in the middle of a grassland, without cell reception, no one for miles aside from the very people who stand to gain something from Lionel’s cooperation. I realize I’m afraid. I want to cover myself all up with miles of soil and rock. This place is too vast, too open. Coyotes yip, cows moan, and the nighttime insects chortle. They’re the only witnesses I’d have.

Of course, I say, “Anything, baby.”

---

I wait until Lionel falls asleep. I take his keys from the dish on the writing desk, careful not to make a sound, and slip outside. The door closes with a soft click. It’s 4 a.m., and only a few streetlights cast weak pools of light on Belfield’s empty streets. I hop up into the driver’s seat of Lionel’s truck. The grunt of the engine startles me as the seat vibrates. I give it gas, and it accelerates out of the driveway quicker than I expect. I can only hope the sound won’t wake the neighboring dogs as I make a break for the highway.

I stare more at the sky, big with stars, than I do the road. My right foot feels so heavy, and every bright thing in the night shoots and swirls as my body hurtles farther and faster. When I do look back to the asphalt, I jerk the wheel to dodge a satellite-eared jackrabbit. It scampers into the brush unscathed, but I go off-road, wheels scorching earth. I keep rumbling, trundling, stones making popping sounds against the undercarriage. A wooden post cracks against the front bumper, barbed wire bending beneath. Shadows of sage sedges and long blue grasses flatten around me. I want to lift my foot from the gas, but I’m all locked up. Then the headlights reflect glossy black eyes, at windshield height, and the front tires of the truck stutter in a ditch. I come to a halt.

A shaggy bison stands there, chewing, drool hanging from his lip. A lone male. He snorts. Flecks of snot and saliva splatter the glass. I sit there for a moment, catching my breath, feeling tingly in the tips of my fingers and toes. Slowly, my body returns to me. I shut off the engine, leaving the key in the ignition, and step out of the vehicle.

Without the headlights, the bison is a massive, moon-backed silhouette, easily as tall and wide as the truck. I feel his hot breath on my cheeks. My nose curls with the smell of dander and musk and sage. I realize, perhaps stupidly, that I’m not afraid. I know I ought to be. Maybe I’ll get my head stampeded in. Or maybe I’ll walk away. I hear him paw at the dirt. He lets out a desperate groan that I feel in the sacrum of my spine. I turn my back. I walk away. I don’t have my Pocahontas moment. Maybe Lionel is right, and I’m naïve for not knowing what made her story so brutal. I’m thinking now it has something to do with mining, chiseling, taking.

I don’t know whose land I’m in. Rancher land, National Park land, US Forest Service land, other people’s land, original people’s land. I am ashamed for not knowing after being knuckle-deep in it. 

The land belongs to itself. I just slide through it.

There’s some sun teasing the horizon, setting the prickly pear ablaze. I don’t know how long I’ve been walking. A pang: I miss my mother. I spy the unnatural blue of the corner of a tarp. I round the butte and yank the fabric to the side. I want to cry out at the sight of her: Loon, half gone. Her spine, a hollow mold. Her skull gleams fleshy pink from the dawn. I collapse to my knees and stretch out on my back in the imprint of her vertebrae. I fit perfectly. The cool stone hugs every part of me; the ridges and valleys that her body left behind puzzle into my armpits, the cleaves of my elbows, the dip at the base of my skull. I stare up at the tide of the Milky Way, fading as the morning braces itself.

I figure this is a “thin place,” or maybe a hollowed-out place. There’s loss in this shale, but mostly its memory. Not like the memories I forced with Lionel. But something more effortless, that doesn’t demand to be pedestaled. A deceptively barren landscape, keeping beautiful things hidden away from those who don’t know where or how to look. The currents of the once-great Western Interior Seaway leave their traces below me. I feel the fault lines running through me.

I don’t want to be found. I don’t want to be extracted. To all but the land: Forget me, please.

I fall asleep in the mosasaur’s spine. 

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I am woken by a woman, her fingers probing my neck for signs of life. The sun glints off her forest ranger badge. The tails of two blondish braids tickle my face. She has a ruddy complexion, eyes big and blue as china plates. She mutters something into a radio clipped to her shirt, not once breaking her gaze from me.

I want to wrap my arms around her, this stranger. “You’re here,” I gasp.

“I’m here?” she says, taking in the crumpled tarp, the empty cavities of vertebrae, the plastered bones we left behind. “You don’t belong here. Why are you here?”

 

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EMILY GIANGIULIO is a writer and educator from Philadelphia. In 2023, she received her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle. Recent short fiction has appeared in Bennington Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Nimrod International Journal. Stories have been nominated and/or shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and The Masters Review Short Story Award. She teaches writing among the loons of rural New Hampshire and is at work on a novel.

 

Featured image by Kvnga, courtesy of Unsplash.