by Nino Cipri
It was such a misnomer, honestly. She had side-eyed the hell out of Damian when he’d started calling them that, and the two of them had eventually gotten into the kind of knock-down shouting match that can only happen between stubborn academics when they’re drunk on too much cheap wine from a gas station. She hadn’t wanted to put labels on the ossicarminis script; calling them oracles infused them with a cultural value that they might not have had. Not that it made them less important, which Damian should have known. He had a degree in archeology, and had, more than once, waxed poetic about the information one could glean from a prehistoric garbage heap. He had done an entire TEDx talk about it, proof that he was a self-aggrandizing dork even before the book deal. The bones didn’t need to be pseudo-religious artifacts in order to be one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. (Which was basically a summary of her third chapter.)
“But we need people to pay attention,” Damian had slurred. “We need to give them a reason to care, otherwise this whole fuckin’ site is gonna be dug up and turned into a fuckin’ wasteland. If not now, then someday.”
The bones were heavy in her hand. The marks into the bone matched the relative angle and depth of the claws found on the skeleton. They’d smeared them with an organic dye, some cousin to a walnut, which meant they’d been tool users, though of a different sort to humans. They probably hadn’t used stone tools, since they hadn’t needed to.
But they’d had language. And they had thought about time.
That was the real reason writing evolved: the need for some semblance of permanence. An acknowledgement that words couldn’t last and memory was fallible. Ossicarminis had their own stories, and they’d wanted them to be preserved for the future.
Min sorted through the bones and looked at specimen three. Ray had identified it as belonging to the metatarsals of some giant-ass monster bird—she could recite whole passages of the Aeneid in the original Latin, but she could never remember the proper names of that species—and the marks were scrawled with what she believed to be a different hand than the other specimens, and possibly at a later date. The symbols were further into abstraction, more stylized, surer than on the other bones. Many of the symbols were naturalistic, though you had to kind of squint and shrug to interpret them. A fern, a fish, a bird in the sky, arrangements of circles and chevrons. They were more ordered here, written in columns along the tibia. She smiled, imagining an industrious ossicarminis scribe writing down the epic battle between a band—no, a romp—of its fellows and a saber-toothed cat. And sure, it was a stupid question, but it was easy to imagine that those sickle shapes up at the top referred to Smilodon’s teeth, and the collection of lines symbolized the number of brave ossicarminis that took it out.
It was just as likely that the bones really were a receipt for the collection of the shiny stones that ossicarminis had collected. Stories of battles had been preserved by word of mouth and memory long before anyone bothered writing them down. The oldest cuneiform tablets were records of economic transactions, the trade of cattle and wheat, not heroic epics. Still, Min understood the desire to preserve the odd tales of triumph. There were never enough.
Min rubbed her fingers over the sickle-shaped gouges. Damian would scream at her for not wearing gloves. Ray would give her another one of those devastating disappointed looks. She sighed and put the oracle bone back in the box.
Google Maps led her to the closest liquor store to the motel, and she bought the cheapest box of wine on the shelf. Not even because she was broke—Annika had assured them that the Smithsonian network would reimburse them for incidentals. But there was something to be said for tradition.
“Okay, so listen,” Min said when Damian opened the door. “I wasn’t mad at you. I really wasn’t.”
Damian looked down the hallway, then opened his door the rest of the way. “Are we really doing this now?”
Min shouldered past him. “I brought booze. Figured if we were gonna get into this shit, we weren’t gonna do it sober.”
She gave him the box of White Zinfandel and sat down on the bed.
“Wow. Should we completely give up on dignity and drink it out of plastic cups?”
“Whatever,” Min said. “We’re talking about feelings, which is undignified enough.” She accepted her cup of wine, drank half of it, grimaced, then drank the rest.
“So you weren’t mad?” Damian prompted.
“I wasn’t,” Min said. “Until you apologized at the zoo. Then I got all pissed off because, because...motherfucker, you really did ditch my ass by the side of the road once you got what you needed from me. And I never really had any time to be resentful of that because I got sucked into a vortex of having to do all this research myself. But now, I’m...holy shit, I’m so fucking mad at you.”
“I”
“And your shitty science! Like the fact that you railroaded us into calling them oracle bones instead of literally anything else. Did you even know that oracle bones are already a thing in linguistic history?”
“I said I was sorry,” Damian said. His voice did that soft hurt thing, which annoyed her even more. Jesus, she wasn’t some simpering suburban housewife at a fundraiser. She wasn’t Ray. She wasn’t gonna fall for that.
“So what?” she said. “That doesn’t mean you get to circumvent me being pissed off at you. I was just too busy with other shit for the last year and a half.”
She held up her empty cup. Damian actually rolled his eyes before taking it, refilling it, and handing it back. She sipped this cup more slowly, though not with any more enjoyment.
“And you know what the worst thing is?” she said. “I actually think you did the right thing, at least for a given value of ‘right.’”
Damian moaned and lay down on the other side of the bed. “God, fucking academics. I hate the way you talk.”
“At least I don’t snitch on my friends.” She threw a pillow at him.
Damian glared at her. “Look, I really don’t want to fight with you.”
She threw another pillow, harder this time. “Why not? It would probably be healthy for us to work out our mutual resentment. My mom is always talking about healthy ways of resolving conflict.”
He threw the pillow back at her, and it caught her right in the face as she was about to take a sip of the terrible wine. White Zinfandel went up her nose, into her eyes, and splashed across the bed.
“You fuck!” Min shouted, and launched herself at him.
The weird thing was, it actually did feel healthy. Min had spent the last six years navigating the delicate politics of the linguistics department and the university, compounded by the fact that she was a woman of color and trans. She’d had to remain perfectly poised even while literally losing her hair from the stress, doing research that everybody half-believed was a hoax. She was overdue for an utter shitfit, and Damian—well, Damian wasn’t the department chair who had belittled her research or that scumbag Jerome who stole her original topic, and he definitely wasn’t that visiting professor who offered her an underpaid research assistanceship while telling her she was “so intriguingly exotic.” (She’d turned him down, but it took hours before she could reply with anything besides “Fuck you you racist sexist shitfuck.”)
Damian wasn’t the reason grad school was a miserable slog, but he had ditched her and made her suffer through it alone, and wow, apparently she had developed abandonment issues along the way.
“I missed you, you asshole!” she said, and punched him in the ribs. Not very hard; she didn’t actually know how to punch.
“Bitch!” Damian shouted. “I missed you too!” He managed to shove her off for a brief moment, but she grabbed onto his legs before he could flee. This was great. It was like being back at Camp Transcendent, at the end-of-summer mud wrestling competition. Only with more rug burn, and Damian wasn’t actually fighting back.
Min managed to get in a few more hits before they were interrupted by a pounding at the door.
“Oh shit,�
� Damian said. They both looked around the room. They’d managed to knock over a standing lamp and the desk chair. The room stank of sour wine.
They tried to disentangle themselves, but the door opened before they could. Ray’s aura of seething disappointment preceded him into the room. He seemed to suck the post-fight endorphins right out of Min’s brain.
“What the fuck are you two doing?” he asked.
Damian pointed at her. “She absolutely started it.”
“To be fair,” Min said, trying to get her hair back in some kind of order. “I just finished writing my dissertation, so some kind of break with reality was inevitable.”
Ray, bless him, shrugged and said, “That makes sense.”
Min ignored him and spoke to Kamal, who was lingering in the doorway, filming. “You! Turn the camera off.”
Then she turned to Ray. “What are you doing here? And why do you have a key to Damian’s room?”
Ray looked down at his hand, which still clutched the plastic keycard. Damian’s cheeks were pink and his eyes looked hopeful. Ew.
“That’s... a complicated question,” he said.
“I slipped it to him at the bar last night,” Damian offered. “Not actually that complicated. Does this mean you forgive me?”
“Both of us?” Min added, because she was weak and hated when people were mad at her.
“I can’t believe you.” Ray shifted his gaze to include Min as well. “It’s not about forgiveness, and believe it or not, it’s not about you, your egos, or your goddamn feelings!”
“So you’re still mad,” Damian said.
Ray threw the plastic room key on the floor. “I’m going back to Kansas. Min, don’t you dare tell your mom about this.”
“Wait, why the hell would you tell your mom?” Damian cried as Ray slammed the door.
Thank god the boxed wine was intact.
***
Do I think ossicarminis went to space? Like, instead of becoming extinct?
Sure. Why the fuck not. God knows I’m tempted to yeet myself into the void half the time. Better than paying back student loans.
***
The morning after: offensively sunny.
Ray’s phone: straight to voicemail.
Min’s hangover: vicious.
The only comfort she took at all was that Damian’s appeared to be equally terrible.
“You look fucking awful,” she told him. She had, at some point, decided that she was too drunk to make it back to her own room, and had fallen asleep on the other side of the king-sized bed.
“Probably not as awful as I feel,” he said miserably. He ran his hand through his patchy beard and groaned. “I’m gonna puke and see if that makes me feel better.”
Min hoped, with sincere viciousness, that ossicarminis went extinct before they discovered alcohol. If she could erase ten thousand years or more of human history and tell those assholes in the Fertile Crescent to put down those fucking grapes, she would.
Damian locked himself into the bathroom while Min turned on the TV, flipping through channels with the volume turned up as loud as her headache would allow. They had thoroughly destroyed Damian’s room: the lamp was still overturned, and empty bottles, a pile of chip bags, and a half-finished cheese plate crowded the tables and floor by the bed. Had they ordered a cheese plate? No wonder Damian was upchucking. Dumbass was lactose intolerant, but conveniently forgot that whenever cheese was involved.
She fumbled for the phone and dialed the front desk. “Do you all have room service?” The Smithsonian was on the hook for all their room charges, she was pretty sure. Even if they weren’t, it was Damian’s room, and he owed her. She vaguely remembered him saying so last night, with that sincerity that only the extremely inebriated could manage.
She doubled her side order of bacon, then begrudgingly ordered a plate for Damian as well. She had managed to work through most of her anger, but the resentment still lingered deep under her skin.
About fifteen minutes after the food arrived, Damian exited the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, accompanied by a billow of steam. The shower and shave had improved his appearance, but he still looked distinctly miserable. At least until he caught sight of the containers of food.
“Oh, shit,” Damian said. He sat down on the bed in his towel and snagged a piece of bacon. Bruises the exact shape and size of her fists dotted his torso, so she figured he’d earned it. Having consumed one plate of bacon and made a dent in the other, Min was feeling a little more charitable and a little less like living death. She pushed the Styrofoam container at him.
“Breakfast poutine,” she explained. “French fries and eggs and some other shit. Avocados, because everything in the Bay Area has avocados. No cheese, because you’re not allowed to puke anymore while I’m in range.”
“If I weren’t gay and you weren’t my oldest friend, I would marry you so hard right now,” Damian said, accepting the plate.
Min didn’t argue. She felt herself relaxing in a way that she rarely felt able to, at least around other people, even as her esophagus burned with bile and her head pounded. Even as, she remembered, one of the most important people in both her and Damian’s life was probably cursing the fact that he’d ever met either of them.
That was a problem for after coffee.
They ate in companionable silence, friendlier than any recent silence that Min could remember with Damian. He tended to talk, to burble like an overenthusiastic fountain. She had to talk louder to keep up, to own some of the space that he effortlessly occupied. It had been good practice for grad school, but she still resented it.
“So,” Damian said. “You punched the shit out of me. Does that mean we’re good now?”
She glared at him over the rim of her nearly empty coffee. “Maybe.”
“What if I use my clout to get you a publisher for your dissertation?”
She glared harder at him. “Fuck you.”
“Okay, so it would be Amelia’s clout, and she’ll probably want to sign you as a client herself, but like. The offer stands.”
He waited as she finished off her coffee.
“Fine,” she muttered. Part of her wanted to turn him down and do it all herself. Wasn’t self-made success the best possible revenge? On the other hand, grad school had forced her to acknowledge that bootstrapping was a myth for white men embarrassed by their own privilege. She’d take a bribe of talking with an agent over the likelihood of having to adjunct at three different schools to pay her bills.
“Great!” he said, then winced. Good, Min thought. She was still too hungover for his normal levels of enthusiasm. “Now that that’s settled, are you going to hit me if I change the subject to Ray?”
“I’m too tired to hit you again,” Min admitted. Also, they should probably talk about Ray.
“So.”
“So.”
“We really fucked up.”
Min resented being included in that, but it wasn’t inaccurate. “Yeah, we did.”
“And he’s in the right.” Damian drank his own coffee.
Min pushed her face into the pillows, remembering Ray’s et tu, Brute? look of betrayal. “Ugh, yes. Yes, he’s fucking right. What’s your bright idea to fix all of this? He wants the skeletons and the oracles back in the cave, but—”
“But there’s an entire mountain of paperwork that says San Francisco has the right to display the skeletons for the next three years, and the state of Nebraska ultimately owns them,” Damian finished. “Trust me, I have been making a lot of calls. If it happens, it’s going to take years.”
“Can we steal them?” she asked blearily. “Like, hire a team of washed-up secret agents or something and pull off an art heist?” She paused. “A skeleton heist?”
“Yeah, I don’t have that kind of money. And I don’t know any former secret agents.”
“And how would you know if you did?” she muttered.
“I’m just saying—” Damian started.
She p
ulled another pillow on top of her, hiding in it. “I know, okay, I fucking know—”
“—that we have already successfully stolen some of the things he wants to re-inter—”
“God damn it.”
“—and could put them back in the cave, with nobody but us the wiser.”
“Us and Ray.”
“Of course.”
Min sat up, knocking her pillow fortress to the floor. “This still makes us shitty people, you know. We’re both doing what’s right to get back in his good graces.”
“The first part of that sentence is the part that matters,” Damian said confidently, then sobered a little. “Okay, yeah, it’s fucked up. But we can work on being better people later.”
Part 3: Ray
My name is Raymond Walker. I’m a professor of biology at Emporia State University, in Kansas. Weird name for a town. I always thought it sounded like the name of a giant flea market.
Right, sorry. In the spring of 2017, I received this email asking me to lend my expertise on a dig in northwestern Nebraska. It was the middle of the semester, so I couldn’t really leave. I wrote back, kind of turning the guy down, telling him I was busy. He keeps emailing, and the next thing I know, this guy is calling me, begging for a Skype meeting. I say yes, because...I don’t know why. He was pushy, and he spelled my name wrong in the email, and the whole thing irritated me. I think I only agreed so I could tell him to fu—to screw off. But then he showed me the bones.
The skull first, and I thought, okay, fine, he needs me to confirm some fossils. I did my dissertation on North American megafauna, and I research—you guys probably aren’t interested my actual research, are you? Only this stuff.
All right. So, Damian starts uploading all these pictures of the rest of the skeleton, and—you know how rare it is to find a complete fossil? Even fossils from recent epochs, it’s always down to luck. There are so many ways that bones get destroyed. Time swallows them up. The earth swallows them up. Rivers bury them, earthquakes break them, animals eat them. You have basically every natural process working against you when you’re looking for fossils. It’s always luck. Damian’s got good luck, I guess.