Kin Before the Word

By 1924 the Isle of Wight had given up the back of a head, and a museum wrote a number on it and put it in a drawer.

The hole where the spinal cord went in was oval then. The ridge behind it already pinched in at the waist. Nobody had a word for what that meant. The animals the word would need were still asleep in Patagonian rock.

Was it one of them in 1950, in the dark, under a label that said almost nothing? Yes. Not because the drawer knew, and not because the oval was a secret it was keeping. It was kin because of who its mother was, and her mother, back to a hunter whose other children walked south. That was settled when it died, a hundred and twenty-odd million years before the drawer.

What changed in Argentina, and in London, and on the screen where they turned it in grey light, was only who could say so. The family was there before the name. It just hadn't been introduced.

Somewhere tonight there is a bone like that, right about itself in every curve, waiting, the way a true sentence waits for someone to need it.