TRILOBITE BLUES

In life, your pet trilobite never got to meet you.

The little oval spent quiet days scurrying about the seafloor, as its kind had always done for hundreds of millions of years. Sometimes it would curl up into a ball to protect itself from danger; other times, just because it could. Long whiskers extended from its helmet to help it bumble its way from meal to meal, as there was only so much light left in the dim world to see through its eyes’ foggy calcite lenses.

The planet then was much more brittle then than it is now, and what would someday be northern Asia had collapsed into a lake of exposed mantle. The sky grew dark with sulfur, and the trilobite body plan, once the very shape of survival itself, had reached the end of its effectiveness. The ocean was changing in composition, and the greater acidity of its waters was too hard on the creature's shell. There was not much oxygen left to breathe, and scarcely anything to eat. In this way, the world would soon forget how to make trilobites altogether.

In the small, flickering dreams of small things, it remembered you, and a distant flash of curiosity across your complicated eyes. Then, it crawled between two warm stones, imagining that they were your hands, and fell asleep. There would be another chance for you to meet, even if it took a quarter of a billion years. It waited for you in geological memory, outside of time, just a chisel and brush away.

Maybe it would be in the gift shop of a local museum, or a roadside attraction somewhere in the Black Hills, or maybe even in a little box beneath an artificial Christmas tree. No matter how, that day would come. Together, you and your pet trilobite would share an impossible present.