A Fossilized Cluster of Frog’s Eggs Defeats a Corbelled
Entry Point
“Professor!”
Charlene cried. “Come take a look at
this!”
I sighed,
glancing at Peskerson (he was wearing a Magma t-shirt: a warm brownie smell
issued from him). I had to pee
(“something fierce,” commented the Fish Parry at a later date), but I staggered
over to Charlene’s assigned section of the grid. She was kneeling beside a shallow hole dug
out of the rocky remains of the Chloromorphus’ kin. The photography must be black and white to
conjure visions of urban sophistication and leisure.
“You’re not
actually a professor, are you?” Dharlonega asked in an undertone.
“Sure I
am.” I had the hat and the beard and the
glasses of an Ernest Hemingway. “Look at
all these people calling me so.”
“But you
don’t actually have a doctorate,”
Dharlonega pressed. “And, I believe, you’ve
got a snotty nose.” She nodded while
Charlene and Bradley carefully packed each egg into a sock-line shoebox. Once the eggs were sent back to the mainland
they would be arranged in a miniature representation of the ceremony of
temporal gelatin, a corn starch impasto standing in for the languagether
binding all of us things together. When
this was done I was afraid for my wife to see it, lest she know what I had
discovered, lest she suspect how I had discovered it.
“What do
you think it is?” Charlene asked. Her
pith helmet was adorned with stickers of trucks and cowboys. Her cape was of shimmering, pliable
ivory. She knew that I talked to myself,
framing the conversation in terms of an imaginary interview. It pained me to give her a ‘B.’
.
