Two Fossils

(A short story covering a long period of time.)

Long ago, a nautilus lived with few consequences, bobbing through the blackness of the world current, large and ever-drifting. One day it settled on the floor of an eternal ocean, barely stiller there than it had been in life. Its shell, once painted in such vibrant branching mandalas, turned brown and hard with sand.

Did it know it was beautiful?

There is an implicit hubris that comes with a mouthful of foot-long teeth. Whether or not animals are able to sin is beside the point. Perhaps the Tyrannosaur knew its body as a monument to the pride of nature. Perhaps all it knew was the exaltation of the blood burning through its veins, of its body’s tank-like impenetrability, of the thousands of pounds of strength in its jaws as they tore through hot flesh and bone. It was the tyrant of the river valley, king lizard, dragon to raze the earth.

It died.

Was it like a star, burning too vital and bright to go on forever? Did it collapse into its own gravity? It was still beside the river as all the valley’s creatures took their share. Its muscles and organs disappeared within a few days. A wiry, shrew-like animal came to take its eyes. Insects plastered the wet insides of its broken skull. A large scavenger, drawn by the sour stench of decay, hooked fangs into its hide and tore, dragged its heavy leg far back into the trees. Half its spine and most of it limbs disappeared the same way. Finally, when it was all but picked clean, rot pulled the last of its tissue, with such care, back into the ground, leaving nothing but a tangle of bone at the edge of the river.

Did the Tyrannosaur know the sin of pride?

The sediment rose with the water as it rained, filling the hollow spaces of the skeleton’s ribs and the sockets that once held its beady eyes. Vertebrae and smaller fragments came dislodged, washed away by the water and rock. Tiny creatures came to settle on the sand above the Tyrannosaur, and below it were even more; it had joined a timeline of beasts below the earth, those who were its prey, those who lived millennia before, when the river valley had been a sea. Tiny vestiges of barnacles pocketed the rock, and nestled somewhere below the Tyrannosaur’s limb was the spiraled imprint of the familiar nautilus.

The waters came and went, sculpting the rock where it folded the corpses between bands of sediment, centuries pressed millimeter-thin like pages of a book. Their bodies cemented unevenly into the side of a forming canyon, the Tyrannosaur’s head close enough to the water’s rush that, one day, the rock veiling it was worn away entirely, and the edge of its hollow eye socket was exposed. It could not see the river that now roared past its resting place. Even as that water receded, the Tyrannosaur could not look out across the great scar carved in the land that had been its kingdom, now an expanse of rock dried in layers of time and bleeding orange in the light of million setting suns. The nautilus was small, nestled in solid stone beneath the Tyrannosaur, and it saw nothing more or less.

Could time grant the Tyrannosaur humility? Could time make the nautilus great?

The world churned.

One day, sharpened tools pulled the Tyrannosaur's skull from the stone. It did not hear the shouts of awe. The climbing apes dragged the chunk of rock containing the skull back to their encampment and told tales of huge fanged monsters, ancient demons of awful power and size, caged mercifully within the earth. The Tyrannosaur was barely anything more now than a solidified scattering of fragments of bones. It kept one femur buried deep in the rock. It kept its ribcage and a few battered bones from its tail.

The archaeologists who excavated the site later were far more excited to find the nautilus, a meter across and so heavy it took three to lift. It sat still in the back of the rattling truck, nestled in its funerary rock. The archaeologists stuck their monkey hands out the windows and hooted to a radio song, victory and road dust in their lungs. They glanced back at the nautilus and felt their chests expand with the breath of the world, all the seething wonder of which the nautilus was part and proof. Does she know? a young one wondered. Does she feel the air?

The Tyrannosaur felt no sense of lost pride when the now-rocks of its bones were packed away into a box in the museum archives while the nautilus, cleaned of all clinging stone beside that which was itself, was displayed beneath a brilliant light. There was no humiliation in the Tyrannosaur’s cowed state, only circumstance; it was once again covered by darkness, though encased now in packing peanuts instead of ancient earth.

When it was finally brought to the surface again and drilled through, suspended by wire from the museum’s ceiling, the skull crowning its new body was not its own, and the limbs assembled beneath it were as foreign as they were lopsided. The not-its-head was held high, the not-its-limbs posed as if itching to leap into the hunt. The Tyrannosaur once again stood tall and struck awe into all creatures who beheld it from below. The not-its-jaws opened in a silent roar toward the heavens, the patchwork silhouette of what had once been more than six animals cobbled posthumously into one.

Still, the Tyrannosaur was huge once again. The nautilus was still.

Little primates filtered through the room holding them. They stared with wide eyes at the colorless nautilus, hooted in awe at the makeshift Tyrannosaur. They took photos, sometimes forgetting not to use flash. Some children cried as their parents dragged them away, wanting to stay a moment longer to stare up at the things that once ruled the earth.

Did they feel pride?

The nautilus sat empty and solid in a display case across the room, far removed from the ocean it had fluttered through long ago. The fragments left of the Tyrannosaur’s true original ribs hung in sterilized air, and though their pose was strong, they held no beating heart, no life or roaring blood.

Did they know they had been made beautiful again?

Neither of them felt anything about the statues made from the remnants of their bodies. The monuments to their lives were preserved in opulence and light, striking awe and immortality into the hearts of the new kings of Earth.

But this may have meant nothing to animals at all.

They died.

It all meant far less to those long-dead.

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