No Dinosaur
Baby had cousins who didn’t believe in dinosaurs.
Carbon dating? They said, How can you trust it? There’s really not enough consensus, and we don’t talk about it enough, those outsider voices who disagree. Besides, you, yes you, yes everyone, all of us, what’s really going on down here is that we’re all just little copies of our parents, believing what we’re told to believe, falling into a world without confrontation, and no questions asked. Cozy little inherited realities that we are.
These same cousins were privy to crop circles, and Jesus. You couldn’t prove either wrong. And yes, there’d been hoaxes, but what do you have to say about the non-hoaxes? How can you explain away that? All those things that haven’t been explained away yet.
Well, a cousin might say, you don’t and you live with our truth.
Which was what Baby did for years. Imagining a world without dinosaurs. Which was a scary thing for her to imagine because what a delightful thing to believe in, dinosaurs were. Like actual magic. When she was a little kid, she thought dinosaurs were as big as mountains, and then sometime in her teens she realized they weren’t that big, still pretty big, but not magical big, at least relative to her toddler imagination.
Her questions: what possible conspiracy could dinosaurs be behind? Why would the whole world have been brainwashed into believing dinosaurs existed? Who and what would that benefit? Power. Was power the answer? Some mysterious entity, pulling strings, Yes, I’ve tricked them. I’ve tricked them into believing dinosaurs were on planet Earth 45 million years ago. The answer, Baby supposed, was the devil was behind the dinosaur hoax. Because the devil wanted to wreak havoc on the Earth. Because the devil had a falling out with God. And could not worship God. And so the devil deployed dinosaurs on the good human beings of planet Earth so as to make them no longer believe in God. And those human beings who pushed the existence of dinosaurs only benefited from this dysfunction that a lack of God created in human beings. It opened up patches for exploitation. General nihilism. Drug usage. So many less tickets punched to heaven, instead, tickets were punched to the hell that is being under the control of other humans on planet Earth.
Baby put down her copy of Vogue with a slim waifish actor on the cover and took a deep breath. Her eye caught the tabletop with the colorful wires and the wooden blocks that rang along its pathway like a roller coaster. There was something so satisfying about watching wood go from one curlicue end to the other. Why did she always think about these kinds of things—dinosaurs, the general populace’s disbelief in certain scientific facts and/or theories—while she waited in line at the dentist’s office? Was it something about the science that goes into maintaining the human body? The blood vessels. The calories. All of those invisible changes every day over time. Like hair!
Another memory: driving on 8 Mile with her brother Stephen when a man pulled up to the red light next to them and rolled his window down. The man was so happy. He said, “Look at my alligator! Isn’t she gorgeous!” The man held up a cardboard box and sure enough inside it was a beady-eyed little alligator with its long, snout mouth and little yellow upside-down triangles of teeth sticking out of it. It was a wonderful surprise, seeing this special animal in such a mundane moment. Stephen took a picture and posted it on Instagram. As they drove out to a Baby Shower in Rochester, they worried about what it meant to have celebrated this encounter so much. Should this animal be in a box like that? Was this in fact animal cruelty? And then they, together, had made a show out of it, posting this incidence of animal cruelty on Instagram, like it was a game, like life was a game. They deleted the picture. Hoped no one had seen it. It had received seven likes over the course of twenty-three minutes, but who could say how many people had seen the picture and not liked it, instead thinking about what poor taste it was, to post something like that, to perpetuate these kinds of deeds.
The reason Baby was at the dentist was because she hadn’t had a teeth cleaning in several years. Over the last ten she had been a coffee addict, staying up all night, reading books about phenomenological theory (her major), drinking whiskey, playing chess, drinking red wine, the occasional Xanax. She didn’t always brush her teeth. And there were a few years there where she didn’t floss, period. There’d been some gum bleeding, for sure. But it wasn’t until two weeks ago when the rotted part of her bottom left-center tooth actually came out in a chunk. You couldn’t see from the front of her face that a considerable part of her tooth had rotten and fallen out of her mouth, but she scraped her tongue until it bled while feeling it out. It caused her to panic. There was no way she was going to tell her dentist about it, but it did push her to the point where she figured it was time to be more serious about her teeth, and to put real actual effort into their maintenance. She crossed her fingers and hoped that nothing more would happen, that her teeth weren’t at the point of some fucked-up no return. She also hoped, of course, that telling the dentist about the lost tooth chunk wouldn’t be the big X-factor in terms of if the rest of her teeth would or would not survive. Because she wasn’t going to tell the dentist. She supposed she would if she knew that telling the dentist would in fact be the major difference between more of her teeth rotting and falling out of her mouth or not, but, again, she was banking that it wouldn’t be.
Many things were coming up in life: Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthdays, and then ultimately, elections. What did Baby hope for? Did she believe her cousins could one day come to her side of things and believe in dinosaurs? Were they worth her time? Did she at one point in her youth believe that she could convince people like her cousins? Had she given up? Did she even try hard enough to convince them throughout the years to have the right to give up? Or did she just let the stone-cold fact of their not believing sucker punch her, as she made her way through the years of her life, even though she could see it coming from a mile away.
And life is that crazy—believe Baby!—because there was also her aunt on her other side. Who used to rave and who had the story of stealing her mom’s friend’s car with her friends and driving it off of a bridge into a river that wasn’t deep enough for anyone to die.
That aunt had the story about being at the trap house on the east side and how when the cops showed up. Her aunt frantically looked for a place to hide, but every closet, every crevice of the basement was filled to the brim with people. She was slender so she opened up the washing machine. To her horror: there was an alligator inside. All grease and green and scaled. It rotated its shoulder, and then its head, to look at her, slowly, like it didn’t want to call the cops’ attention either. She slammed the washing machine shut. It’s fine, the aunt said. There was nowhere to hide. So the aunt just waited and hoped. Waited and hoped that no one would come down in the basement and see her seventeen-year-old self drunk and high and in the middle of something that didn’t feel right. And no one did come down. And the party got started up again. But the aunt left. And never partied there again. And developed a lifelong phobia of washing machines.
“Baby,” the receptionist said. “Baby Stills, you’re up.”
Baby got up and made her way to the door to the back of the office where a leather seat covered in paper awaited her and tools that buzzed and vibrated. On her way to the door she spun a yellow wooden ringer around a yellow metal wire on the children’s play table. A mother took her eyes off of Home and Cooking and gave Baby a dirty look. Her eyes were brown. Her nose small. Her fingernails pink. Her wrist covered in a silver watch with a cobalt leather strap. It was hard to say what the woman believed. Knowing people, it could be anything. Astrology? The sentience of rivers? The theory that human societies lived on planet Earth billions of years ago, only to go extinct and be erased by geological forces? Baby stopped looking at her. This brown-eyed, small-nosed woman who didn’t like the way she touched the children’s play table. At some point, we need to stop looking at everyone. At some point, what are you even really going to do with the memory of a person’s face?
Elijah Sparkman is a writer based in Detroit. His writing has appeared in Sleepingfish XX, X-R-A-Y, and Bending Genres. He is the Program and Volunteer Coordinator for 826michigan, a youth creative writing organization. He is a member-owner of the co-op bookstore Book Suey in Hamtramck, MI. He is a memoir reader for Split Lip Magazine. Website: elijahsparkman.com Instagram: @elijahsparkman20.
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