We used to hike up to the mountain top together, Yusef and I, every first and third Friday of the month. We’d drag our wagon of fresh-slaughtered beef up the rocky path, our flashlights cutting beams beneath the violet sky. I called him Yusef because he didn’t like Father or Dad or Papá. “Soy Yusef,” he’d say to me, bleakly. I never asked him why; he’d always just been Yusef. To the rest of our neighbors, they knew him as the man who fed dilophosaurs.
For a while it was just him feeding them, going up and down that mountain just like Papá Efrain did before him, and I’d stay up to hear the hoots and caws knocking echoes against my bedroom window. He said he did it to take the edge off—keep them at bay on their own hunting grounds outside the colony walls—but they always watched us from the woods, their eyes reflecting moonglass-white from the streetlamp’s glow. Mom used to say that they were just birds, and would never hurt him, but I’d picked up the hesitation in her voice.
In our house we did not share emotions, I suppose we never learned how—our arguments were marked by stern words and even tones, ending with echoes of gentle locks to bedroom doors. We never said “I love you.” Yusef never uttered the words, never cried out except for the single time he drank himself stupid, weeping tears into his own puddle of booze and sweat and grief the morning Mom died—to her I’d say, “Te amo,” but that was all. No, here love was shown in overnight steamed tamales, or a glowing plate of red enchiladas because words did so little and were messy, fragile things, but food took time to get right. And all those nights I’d hear Yusef prepare the meat for his creatures, always one of our best cattle. Never sickly. Never too old. Bleeding meat that I know to him meant, No te preocupes, te voy a cuidar.
The first night I’d joined him, he hadn’t gone in weeks. He’d cold turkeyed it after stretches of seeing them almost every night when Mom was too sick to come home, and I too foreign a creature for him to bother staying with. I watched him from the kitchen doorway as he sat on the couch next to the spot where Mom once sat, the shape of her still pressed into the cushions. His eyes glazing over as grainy Earth cartoons reflected off his gaze, the smell of alcohol wafting off him, tickling under my nose. He’d done this for days and days, and I had enough of it—his groveling—told him that tonight was the night that I was ready to learn.
He blinked, rubbed exhaustion from his eyes, and asked if I was certain. I said, “Yes.”
I was sixteen.
Up there we built a fire in the night cold, the crescent of Kepler 422b. sailing above us, a swirling beige ship on a sea of black. Yusef handed me his knife, its blade was anemic-thin but it still cut as good. “You know how to use this?” he asked, trying to make small talk when the knife wasn’t enough to slice the silence between us. He and I. The only two left. Our shallow, sheepish breaths the only real sounds.
“I’ve used a knife before,” I said, meaner than I meant.
I’d butchered before too, for years because Yusef wanted me to be tough. Because he’d caught me with Sara in the cedar tree out back and said, full of sharp rage, “Si vas a portar como un hombrezote así te puedo tratar.” But out there was my first time butchering with just a knife, and not in the sterile room we had back home that smelled of lye and disinfectant. Out there I pressed down the full weight of me to split the ribcage. I slit the skin and steadied my hand. Swallowed my fear, and my blade drank warm iron. I didn’t stop until steam rose off my arms, red from elbows to trembling fingers, and by then they’d arrived.
When I was young, I’d wanted nothing more than to see the dilophosaurs, the keratin, V-shaped crests atop their brows, their back feathers the color of autumn leaves. Mom never let me. But I’d wanted to show them I wasn’t the weepy little girl Yusef said I needed to grow out of, so when they materialized from the night, standing still on bent back legs, monolithic as if they’d been there the whole time, I stood firm. This isn’t for me, I told myself. It’s for Yusef, and Papá Efrain, and Grandma, and Mamá.
The stench of death clung to them, the firelight licked the edges of their head crests, their razor fangs, their spindly claws. They curved their massive bodies above us, around me to Yusef, the heat of their breath pushing against me. Occasionally, one or two would shift their serpent necks back to catch me in the gleam of their onyx eyes. There’s an old saying back on Earth Mom used to tell me: “The souls of dead sailors inhabit seagulls.” When I saw them in the firelight, I thought, Dilophosaurs are birds too.
The little ones were quick to rip off chunks of meat from the carcass, pinning them to the dirt with trident talons and stripping the flesh in glittering ribbons. I held down my own dinner that fought to wretch up, but Yusef didn’t so much as notice the grizzly chewing.
“Adrian.”
He called to me from the mass of them, their tails cradling him. “They read you. Any mistrust, any malice, and they’ll defend themselves. Pero, mira,” he said. He raised his hands and they brushed snouts to palm. He’d held out a heart or lung or liver or glistening spleen, and a fanged smile would emerge from the shadows, snatch it up. The smile and the meat receding back into the dark. He’d make little clicks with his lips, then puckered for them when they came to sniff his musk. When they got close enough, he planted little kisses on their crests. My cheeks warmed, I fought the urge to turn away—as if I was privy to something intimate and beautiful and horrific all at once. In their dance, I couldn’t tell his shadow from theirs; he was one of them. But even while my fingers trembled, I couldn’t help but smile. If Yusef had been dying, slipping away like Mom did for so many years—like I was too, trapped in that quiet, empty home—it was those dinosaurs that brought him back.
He loved them.
He even sang for them.
That’s why I couldn’t ever hate Yusef. How could I? When everyone else was against him? While Yusef withered, a reclusive widower in our old ranch house, I was the one who stomached going into town to bear the ignorant and spiteful things the people who grew up with him fired point blank: that Yusef was crazy. Senile and old. That I should have abandoned him when my mother died. I always sucked teeth at them, or shot insults back with my own glares, and Mom’s wits, Yusef’s meanness festering also in me. They expected nothing less! I was Yusef’s daughter after all—degenerate daughter of the man who fed Dilophosaurs.
But they didn’t know him. They thought he was the same man he’d been decades ago: A cheat. Thug. Grifter. Deserter from the war. Never mind that getting out of that line of dirty work cost him two dozen stitches and his straight posture, everyone in our little no-name colony still feared him as if he were another carnivore—best left in solitude. He wasn’t any of those things though. I’d seen him in the firelight brushing his hands against the patchy feathers of Dilophosaurs. He was just lonely.
“You can just ditch him,” Sarah had suggested to me, one last time before I never saw her again. Sarah—who wore bright colors whereas I wore too much black, and said she liked the contrast. Who made me laugh when her lips tickled down my neck and whose hands felt as natural as my own when sliding down my hips; Sara who’d said she loved me years ago between hot kisses in the barn behind my house, her over me, and me yielding to say it back. Yielding my body to hers.
That last day, she wore her yellow sundress and her hair beamed gold in the daylight. “We’re leaving tonight. Maybe you can come just to look, like a vacation. And we’ll pay for a ticket back too. You know, to see if off-world is a good fit for you.”
We sat with our feet dangling, atop the fire escape on the atmosphere processor close to the marketplace—our secret spot—to view the starships bobbing up and down beyond the mountains and colony walls.
“Can you think about it, at least?” Sarah asked.
And I said, “No. Not really.”
When she stood up, I asked, “Is this a breakup, then?” Knowing we’d never work long distance. Lightyears—the incalculable rift. We’d already spoken on it. She was leaving, escaping, blipping off my world and I didn’t even choke up about it. It was more a fact than anything else; a tangible thing of being there and then … not anymore.
“Guess so.” Her disappointment coating ever word.
I think deep down I was screaming, or I had been for a long time. Got used to the noise. I never screamed out, never pulled my hair—I held it down. It’s not about me. Never was, not when Mom and Yusef and the whole of us would go extinct if I chose to leave it all behind. And then no one would know what happened there, on that ranch some man built when he’d brought his family with him chasing dinosaurs across the stars.
I told her I loved her, and it felt the same as all the other times I’d said it—out of obligation of being the only other queer in the whole colony. Sarah made a nervous laugh and kissed my cheek and I smiled tight-lipped. Resisted the urge to grab her by the ears and scream. I didn’t though. I muttered a bye, and waited for the metal footsteps to fade as she climbed back down the fire escape, until she was gone from my life.
I leaned back against the cold metal shell of the processor, already used to the humming from its internal mechanisms. A shuttle roared above me and vanished beyond the clouds. The only evidence it had been there was the black streak slashed across the blue, and the flock of pterosaurs scrambling where the ship tore through them. Three minutes passed for that line in the sky to fade, and by then it was as if nothing had ever really been there.
If I wanted to fly, my body did the opposite. My blood rooted me deeper on our moon 370 parsecs from Earth. I’d resigned myself to feeding the dilophosaurs with Yusef. For years as I pieced together the story of him through drunk confessions he’d uttered up there with the dilophosaurs: propositions of love for them, requests for freedom. I imagined Papá Efrain used to do the same, and that I would too when Yusuf was gone, till the end of my days.
Then Yusef died at the edge of the woods three days ago when Enoch—last of the styracosaurus—split open the forest and skewered him with his center horn.
And what did I do but run and hide and slam shut the house door behind me before I sank onto my bloody, battered knees and swiped at the thoughts pecking my head: my fault, my fault, my fault.
My fault because I killed Yusef the moment I spotted a Juvenile from the attic window.
It was prancing in the sunlight, apparently after having flattened our fence and scattering the cattle, now nipping at a butterfly fluttering above its beak. By the look of its horns, you could tell what it was—that it shouldn’t have been—a Styracosaurus, no older than a year or so. Even from the attic, I could see just how big it was for a juvenile. It could have easily been triple my weight, and four feet tall at the hips. To a non-native of Pan, a styracosaur was just another flavor of triceratops, but where triceratopses had three horns jutting from their heads, a Styracosaurus needed only one. Instead, their head frills fanned out, a crowns of horns as long as swords. It was for those horns that they were all of them poached. I would know, my Papá Efrain was part of it.
The juvenile hardly noticed when Yusef and I approached, rusty locks and chains heavy in our hands. It didn’t seem to care that we were humans either, which made me think it must not have ever seen one before. How naïve. We snapped on the cuffs, the chains, tied the squealing thing to the cedar tree. When we were done, I asked Yusef how much a horn could carve away at the bills piling up at home, and he said, “It’s worth more than a fortune. It will cry out for its mother, and soon enough she will come.”
A week passed, all the juvenile did was scream and scream. I’d try to go back to transcribing my grandmother’s diary into my own, what I often did, making a better, more comprehensive account of us in the dim attic light, but the creature’s crying was insistent. Eventually, tired of it, I stormed out across the field to the tree to shut it up—saw that the juvenile wasn’t under the tree, a boy was instead. Prodding a stick up into screaming, rustling branches.
“Hey—hey!” I called. “Put that down! Now!”
It only took the sight of me for the kid to drop the stick and bolt. I didn’t bother chasing him, just lazily came to a stop and stood where he had. Up in the tangle of branches, the Juvenile whimpered. I could hardly make out the shape of it, but its amber scales glimmered through the leaves. I’d planned to at least reprimand the boy, twist his arm, and demand he explain why he was on our property, why he thought it was okay to torment some animal. I knew the answers though—because this was a short cut from the school to the market. Because he was just a kid and I’d done the same things once. But I’d wanted to scare him. Squish him and the rest of town under my taloned foot if I had one, if I’d been made large like the tyrannosaurs, or brontosaurs, but I wasn’t. I was a five-foot-four girl and an echo of the one who used to chase procompsognathus across the town square with her mom.
I looked back up to the mass of pebbled scales in the leaves. “Come on, get down,” I told it, voice calloused. Curiously, I watched it lounging in the branches. How it got up there was a small miracle in and of itself. The whole tree groaned beneath it. Wait. Not it—She. Huh.
I hesitated, sighed, then, against my better judgment, climbed up after her.
The whole way up, she watched me with her stupid, oblivious eyes, as if she wasn’t aware that she was a miracle. Only Enoch had survived the poaching, the last of the Styracosaurs. Ancient and withered, and not seen in years. He must have been over a hundred by now, like a persisting god kept alive by nature’s will. “And yet you’re here,” I said to the juvenile. She was still whimpering. “Shut up.” She would not. I prodded her with a branch I’d snapped off a tree and groaned, but she didn’t budge.
The branches creaked below us. A fall from that height would have bruised her, break a bone of mine, but both of us falling? Her landing on top of me? Well, that would have been the end of me, splat! But this wasn’t about me. Stupidly, I proceeded across the thick branch.
I mumbled in short breaths laced with swears, reaching my hand out as far as I could, anchoring myself to the tree with my other. I was almost there— inches away— the juvenile still whimpering. “Oh! You don’t have anything to cry about,” I said, Yusef’s words now pushing through my own locked teeth. “We’ll let you go once your mom’s here. She’ll pay for our food and land tax, and you’ll probably be sad about it, sure, but that’s all—sadness dissipates. You’ll get to live and explore the rest of this rock, you might even find love, maybe even another styracosaurus. And you two could have little endangered styracosaurus babies. You know? You won’t rot here, so stop fucking crying!”
Got her! With the full weight of my body behind me, I lurched her close enough towards me that branches snapped, and she tumbled down the tree trunk, thumping on the ground below in a gust of branches and fluttering leaves.
Woah.
I leaned back, heart hammering against my ribs. Breathing heavy. Once I pulled myself together to start back down the tree, I froze a few branches down when I spotted it along the forest’s edge across the field—Him—watching me with knowing eyes between the leaves, his face crimson, his horns piercing the trees: Enoch.
A flimsy wooden fence was all that separated his world from ours.
I just stood there, in the branches, jaw hanging and blinking like an idiot. I looked at the baby, then at him and I knew. I didn’t even hear the branches snapping below, not until it was too late. And by then I fell.
I woke up on the living room couch with warm afternoon light streaming from the windows, gold and dreamy. The rough burlap of our couch left indentations on my skin as I peeled off it, sitting up, head pounding, lips dry. Yusef sat on the far end of the couch. If there had been a split, or fork to a different reality where Yusef didn’t die, this the rout I’d gone down with him, one where no matter what, he made the same choice, and I had no say. “Found you below a tree,” he said. Added that he’d needed the help of our neighbor Maria to get me here.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Back home. But she said she’d come by if I needed the help.”
“I mean the juvenile.”
Yusef shrugged. “Still out back. Though, it’s sleeping now. What happened?”
I told him, and for the first time I saw what my mother meant when she said Yusef’s eyes sparked gold. And it made sense why someone would marry and then stay with a man who had those eyes. “He’s here? Great—We’ll start setting up the snares then. Get the bear traps too— Oh, and nets!”
For some reason I smiled. A stupid laugh escaped between my teeth. “Well, that’s good, yea? We don’t have to hold onto the baby anymore. She’ll be on her way once we’ve got Enoch.”
A pause. An awful pause that twisted my guts.
“Well,” Yusef said. He glanced at the pile of bills addressed in my mother’s name laying on the coffee table. Like ghost ripples across time. Like sunlight taking so long to reach us from our star.
“What?” I muttered.
He spoke with the words slipping out the side of his mouth. I wondered where he picked up that habit. “Enoch’s not the only one now. There’s a mate, so three at least. And it will only be a few years till this one reaches maturity, you know. By then it’s horns will be big enough—”
“No.” I said it accidentally, I couldn’t believe it, but once the first word escaped, the others spilled out. “No, you said you’d let her go. That—that was the plan. She’s still young and Enoch’s lived his life. We had a plan. There might still be more out there for them to breed.”
“If there’s more, then she’s just one,” he said. I opened my mouth, but he held up one jaw-shutting finger. “I’m old, Adrian. We have less cattle every year.” Because we feed them to your pets! Because your father had a change of heart at the end of his life, and once the Dilophosaurus had no more prey to hunt they moved in close, desperately looking for any kind of living, breathing meat. And your father chose to appease them!
Yusef balled his fists. “Look, I won’t be here forever … and you’re going to have to take care of things.”
“Yusef, that’s not the point,” I started, but he shouted “Cállate!” and it scared me shut. Any willpower I’d harbored evaporated into the air and I was a daughter again, sixteen, mourning a mom, afraid of her stranger father as much as she was the dilophosaurs.
The words hung in the air, and Yusef added nothing. Pathetic.
Like I said, in our house we did not shout. We did not scream. We held it down and locked doors in silence, so that’s what I did. I was good at it. I sat on my bed and constricted the emergency backpack I kept under my bed until my fingers locked up, and when my arms went weak and my cries balled up in my throat, I set it aside. I breathed. I wasn’t going to leave. I couldn’t do that. I sucked it up, buried it down.
Withdraw.
Withdraw.
Withdraw.
I didn’t come out for hours until I had to prepare dinner, and that was when I chose to do it, when I killed Yusef. Banda music was playing softly on the radio.
Yusef watched cartoons on his phone. The same ones I’d watch with him on his lap when I was a kid. He was already drunk, his eyes glazed over. I watched him from the landing, resting the weight of myself on the banister.
How long had we been like this? I always thought we were cursed, he and Mom and my grandmother—all casualties we almost overcame. Where still overcoming. Yusef was gone when it got Papá Efrain, he’d gone off to fight in a war, and Papá Efrain was left to feed the dilophosaurs on his own when he slipped in the slick of a carcass’ blood. And when he was flat on his back, the dilophosaurs did not care to know the difference between friend or food.I thought it was too late to do anything about us, our story was over, and I was a tacked-on epilogue to a better story about better people.
In the kitchen I made us huevos rancheros. I cracked the eggs into a searing skillet and went to refry the frijoles. I cooked tensely, my shoulders knotted tight, and my whole body a wound-up spring too afraid to tap or bump anything in the world. The mass of the wood walls and tiled roof pressed against my broad shoulders, my hips, I felt Yusef’s gaze etching into my spine. The sour liquor in his sweat I smelt from there. I made a quick glance back at him and caught Yusef sitting hunched and vulture-like at the end of our dining table, splitting open peanuts with his calloused thumbs. He was lanky, with sunken eyes and mouth wrinkles that hinted he used to smile. I realized my face was tight, my brow furrowed. I was glaring at him.
I know what you want to say, the words formed in my head. That you think I’m angry. Bitter. And you’re not.
Once the eggs bubbled white and greasy, I scraped them off with a spatula and gently set them on the tortillas, next to the frijoles. I ground up the salsa next, thick and fresh with a mortar and pestle, the way Mom taught me. A dish that meant, forgive me.
By his reaction, he didn’t even taste the chalky white pills I’d laced into the frijoles. Mom’s sleeping medication. I waited until Yusef finished his food and passed out on the couch to slip the keys to the juvenile’s shackles off his belt loop.
He was right, I was bitter. What happens when you keep something smothered and buried for so long? Where does that angst go? Eventually, it hardens, it festers, it cracks into something else. Something calloused like Yusef. If I couldn’t run away, like all the times I’d planned. I could right a wrong. I could get her out.
I backed out towards the door with my eyes glued to him snoring. In the amber sunset, Yusef looked like me. Same crooked nose, same wispy hair. Our skin baked gold-brown from the sun. I wanted him to wake up. I hoped he’d grab my wrist and make me stop this and lecture me like a proper caring father, but I got the keys out no problem. And I snuck out the creaking door.
“I’m sorry,” I said back to him “I’ll be back soon.” And I meant it.
When I think about who Yusef was, I return to a safe place in my mind, one of the earliest entries in my Mamá Lora’s diary, and the first to catch my eye when I’d breached the seal and invaded her secrets in the attic so many years ago. I kept coming back to that entry, like an anchor to the family we left behind; I see it so vividly in my own head that I’m not sure if the memory is my Mamá Lora’s or mine now.
Rusted metal and silent corridors were all that Yusef had known, born into that world, or lack thereof, in a starship some thousand light years across the gulf of space. Fifty years ago, he sat on his wall-mounted bed with a book larger than his whole body spilled across his lap. And in that book were giants.
“You’ll be scared at first,” my Papá Efrain warned Yusef, sitting by his side. He pointed to the pictures spread across the pages of Yusef’s book. His finger tapped extinct tigers, elephants too, and some pages down, whales. “They’ll be bigger than those, but they won’t step on you. Not if you’re careful. They’ll have teeth and claws and quills and feathers, but they won’t eat you. You’ll get to know them, and we’ll live with them, share their land. And you’ll grow up in a better place than this.”
My Papá Efrain had made a choice back then. Better to hunt and kill styracosaurs, leave them lying in the dirt with their horns carved off and leaking marrow, than to have his family perish on Earth.
I wonder if I could have made the same choice if I stood where he stood. I don’t know. We’ve always lived on Pan.
But.
If I could see the variations of our lives, all lined up next to each other like the blades of grass I used to pluck and place along my bare thigh, I’d like to see how other me was doing. Or my other family, if we’d never left Earth and stayed in Mexico—a home I cannot picture. I’d like to see if there was a reality where Mom was still alive, of if Yusef never met her. Where would I be in those? I imagine it would be similar to the reality where I actually did run away after Mom died; I’d done all my calculations—how far we were from everything—planned to wedge myself somewhere between cold metal pipes of some ship’s cargo hold, the backpack I’d prepared but emptied over time when I’d need the jeans or shirts or pocket knife, until all that was left waiting for me inside of it was my guilt—maybe in that life I actually got somewhere.
Those lives must have been real. I’ve seen starships jump cross the stars, watched spacetime rip open on the horizon by great machines to make things a thousand lifetimes away, not so far anymore. We found dinosaurs on this hidden rock; why couldn’t there be better lives out there than the one I was given?
Out back, I un-notched all of Yusef’s traps that lurked below the grass blades. I’d spent years learning them, taking them apart I did easily, casually. Through dusk the juvenile and I rushed through the field to the gate where the lip of the forest waited just beyond, and where the dilophosaurs must have been waiting also, overwhelmed with the smell of us.
By the time I noticed the shine of their eyes, it was too late, the gate was open, creaking like a diner bell, and they descended tooth and claw and talon all ripping into the screaming juvenile.
I swung my palms—slammed my knuckles against them, ripping out tufts of mangey feathers but they shoved me back. Even the smallest of them was so much bigger than me. They didn’t even recognize me, lost to the ripping and thrashing and the smell of warm blood.
And then the ground shook. And the earth fell silent.
Enoch, the massive, ancient, towering styracosaurus barreled in to split the forest, reared back on spavined legs, the muscles rippling, his crown of horns piercing the sky—flattened the dilophosaurs too slow to escape the crashing weight of him.
It happened in red flashes of teeth and feathers: Yusef running out from the house with a gun in his hand, his other hoisting me back to my feet, the single warning shot he cracked into the sky. I begged him to come with me, I tore my throat raw pleading for it, but he didn’t hear. A dilophosaur lunged for Enoch’s throat—its guts spilled out with a single jerk of Enoch’s crown. Yusef pushed me back and blasted two bullets into Enoch’s hide.
I took off. My side splitting, shins splinting a thousand digging knives; If I’d yelled his name out one last time, he might have been spat out by his sinking tunnel vision and Yusef would have swerved, and Enoch, the beast, the forest god might have missed. And I wouldn’t have been left alone. Instead, I shut the door behind myself and sank to my knees as Enoch skewered Yusef with his center horn.
My fault.
In his last moments, Yusef didn’t scream, though I wish he had. Or if he’d cried, or grunted, or swore out loud in a final fit of desperation for his life, but he never did those things—always held it in and smothered it dead ever since his father once told him to be a proper hombre, to toughen up and stop being a weepy little bitch, and Yusef did. Regurgitated those same, ugly, toxic, words when he punched my gut below the cedar tree once. I took the hit, gave a hit, earned his respect with a split lip, and lost something in me.
My fault.
It’s been three days now since Yusef died, since the quietness that once haunted our ranch spiderwebbed and shattered into a thousand glass shards that I keep cutting myself on trying to pick up. Just last night I fed what was left of the dilophosaurs, scarred and brittle. The carcass blood is dry and flaky across my cheek and chest.
His dinner plate still waits on the table. I can’t bear to clean it. I think about the time I almost ran away, the night Mom died. My university savings I’d spent to shave off Mom’s medical bills, but I had just enough for a one-way ticket. By midnight I’d made it to a cold and quiet space port, bought it, and instead of boarding, I threw up my guilt in the tin toilet of a public bathroom. After that, each day had carved bit after fragile bit of my sides, laid me raw and exposed to the air where I calloused and stiffened for so long, I no longer smelt the festering. And now who will Adrian be, but six little letters comprised in that order, and nothing else.
It takes everything for me to say the words out:
“I don’t want to die here.”
But they’re weak, hoarse, and cling to the inside my ribs. I hold my guilt from vomiting out. I have to stay in the bones of this house, because if I don’t then no one will know who built our house, or who lived here, laughed here, and sang here, or about the man who fed dilophosaurs. But as I sit here on the floor, looking at a sun-faded picture of our family, I hear the rumble of a ship outside, and the roar of pterosaurs. And I know that I don’t want to die here again. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
What do you do after something like this? Well. You can stay, go home, wash off and keep living the routine you’ve known all your life.
Or you can end. And then. Become something new entirely.
Originally published in The Mesozoic Reader (From the Farther Trees, 2022)
