The word of the day is “Dinosaur”

February 24, 2010 at 9:26 am · Filed under Prose and tagged: childhood secrets, like a story I once read, writing prompts

I didn’t tell my dad I found the fossil. I picked it up from the sand and I put it in my pocket.
I knew that if I told him he would take it and he would add it to his collection. I was not allowed to touch that collection as I was too young.
So it was better that it stay secret and that no one but me know about what I found.
I kept my word on that. Even on his death bed, when his eyes were weeping pus and his once strong, sun tanned hand was weak and riddled with veins, I kept completely schtum about the fossil.
Of course I knew by then that he wouldn’t take it. But over time, the fossil had become my connection to the earth. I was an imaginative little kid, but I wasn’t taken by bible stories or the practised rhythms of church. I liked to link myself back to the billions of years of history of our earth.
The fossil did that.
Late at night I lay in bed with the bedhead light switched on and I turned it over in my hands, tracing the mathematically perfect, expanding slices of the shell.
It was magnificent. If I pressed it to my cheek and closed my eyes I could picture the low, salty inland sea where it had once moved its sluggish body over soupy sand and the decaying remains of other animals that neither you nor I nor many a scientist had the foggiest clue about.
The unknown world, the world which was our world, fascinated me.
But there was one person who I almost told about the fossil I had found, soon after I had found it.
Where we lived the houses were all spread far apart. There was a group of young women who shared an old farmhouse about two kilometres down the road. Every so often, from our shady front yard, I would see them walking with their arms linked, singing songs quietly to themselves.
My mother told me not to talk to them. She said they were part of a cult. I didn’t know what that meant then, so to me the word seemed attractive. I wanted to be part of a cult, particularly if it involved walking down the street with arms linked and voices raised in song.
But I was a fairly obedient boy so I didn’t say anything.
That, of course, didn’t stop them saying anything to me.
One morning, while my parents were still moving sluggishly around the kitchen pouring cups of tea and buttering bits of brown toast with apricot jam I crept outside, and, as I was not in the habit, I pressed the fossil into the dirt, picturing hard the life it once hosted.
I was so deeply concentrated on this imagining that I failed to notice the shadow which leap across my crouched over firm and delineated in the hard packed red brown dirt, which my father had once advised had been rich and wet from a much expanded river.
“What you doing kid?”
I looked up sharply and quickly pocketed the fossil. I knew instantly that the woman standing over me in her long flowing dress with her long flowing hair was one of the women who lived at the farm house. She wasn’t very young. She looked my mother’s age. But unlike my mother she had a light around her eyes which suggested, God forbid, she might be happy.
“Nothing,” I said, not altogether convincing.
“Go staring at the soil all day and you might sprout roots.” She said to me.
I flushed a deep dark crimson. For some reason the word ‘roots’ really got to me.
I shook my head and fiddled with the laces on my sneaker.
“Cat got your tongue?” She asked.
I shook my head again.
“My mam always told me if you can’t spit out a sentence people will keep putting them in your mouth.”
“My mum told me not to talk to you,” I said.
Her eyebrows darted up.
“That right?” She thought it over. “And what about your dad?”
I shrugged.
“My dad hasn’t said anything.”
“I know he hasn’t,” she said with a confidence I found confronting. “I knew your dad. Did you know that?”
I shook my head.
“When we were young. When we were your age. We were friends he and I.”
I looked up at her seriously. I was surprised. Not that she, this woman, had known my father, but that my dad had ever been my age. Had ever had friends!
“You did?” I pushed my hair back from face, clearing my vision of her. She let me do a once over, knowing that my youthful gaze was only curious.
“Your father was a right little prick,” she said seriously. “He was so good til one day he grew up.”
I flushed again.
“You don’t want to hear this. I get it kid. You ain’t grown up yet.”
“Not true,” I said. I wanted to tell her I had all my adult teeth, but I thought she might laugh. I guessed that having all my adult teeth was not what she meant by my being grown up.
“Once, when I was a little bit older than you are now, your dad took me out to the cinema. We hated the film. It was terrible. All saccarine sweet and boring as all hell. So we left early and we went down the lake. It was bigger then than it is now. All the drought has dried it up. Somehow your dad convinced me to take off my clothes and jump in the water. Can you believe it kid?”
I shook my head.
“Believe it.” She was quiet for a moment. “Can you keep that a secret from your mum?” She asked.
I knew it was more than that. The secret was bigger than what she said, the same way my tiny fossil represented something larger than the tiny creature it once cradled.
“Yes,” I said.
“Like a man?” She asked. “Like a real man?”
I nodded again.
She gave me a critical once over.
“Just a boy, don’t believe you.” She said.
And that was when I almost did it. I almost revealed to her my own secret, the carefully hidden fossil that was warm in my pocket and the fascinations that it brought to my mind.
I think I was so on the edge of that revealing that it would have taken the slightest prevarication for me to tell her about it. Fortunately for me though, she pushed away from the chicken wire fence which acted as a barrier between us.
“Just a kid,” she said as she walked away, not letting me respond.
And the secret was saved. And so was hers.

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