Malena McKaba is a writer and the fiction editor at Two Headed Press. Previously, her work has appeared in Chinquapin and Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, and short films that she’s directed have shown at film festivals across the country. Malena is currently lingering in Oakland, California with her tabby cat.
Echo
After the urgent care visit, I decide to visit the Museum of Natural History. I need something to get my mind off the blood. There is a temporary exhibition called “Beyond Cavemen”, which contains remnants of hominids and early nomadic man. I saw an ad for it on a bus weeks ago, but never found the time for it.
There is a crowd of children on a field trip in the lobby. Different teachers hold up signs with different colors. By the time I pay for my ticket, one of the groups is beginning a tour with a youngish docent who is chirpy and has a perfected stage voice. “Everyone, follow me, and hang a right up ahead!” she calls, walking backwards. I linger shortly behind the group, pretending to be aimless, as if I’m engrossed by the list of donors marked by tier along the hallway. Ahead, I hear the tour guide ask if anyone knows what ‘anthropology’ means. The study of man, a child calls.
The exhibition has been divided sequentially by chronology and hominid, a fast forward through our evolution.
Homo habilis: The toolmaker. Homo erectus: The firemaster. Homo neanderthalensis: Lost cousins. The docent lectures beside a habilis skull, points out the elongated forehead. “It looks more like an ape, doesn’t it?” I listen along towards the back, taking in the free tour.
This is my second miscarriage. The first one was years ago, when I was too young. I only felt relief when it happened then. It was not a good time for me to have a child.
It still is not a good time.
I gaze at the specimens on the wall. A rock with many grooves, a rudimentary sharp edge. I imagine this very rock in a hand like my own, although much tinier and harrier, striking it against another rock with all my might. I imagine that hand running a thumb along the edge. Sharp enough. As the BCE dates shrink in the display case, the tools become more refined and sharper.
“This is the first sign we see of human cultural behavior,” the docent explains to the children. The sentence makes my breath catch in my throat.
The group moves on.
“Homo erectus is the hominid that learned how to create fire. How would fire help humans?”
“Warmth!” a kid calls out. The docent nods, but she’s waiting for something more.
“You can cook!” another shouts. The tour guide’s eyes gleam.
“Cooking! Yes!” she exclaims, launching into a new lecture about how cooked meat helped our brains develop more intelligence, leading the crowd and me along.
The tour guide is explaining how anthropologists can tell from the burn patterns of bones and debris that it was a purposeful fire, instead of a wild burn. The kids ooh and ahh, and crowd around the display case. I’m curious to how the wood looks different myself, but see no way around the throng of children.
Behind the group, through a constructed cave mouth entrance, are tombs. The first burials. A shaman with his jewels, a juvenile wrapped in a blanket, a woman found beside the remains of flowers. I notice the docent skips this part of the exhibition, and instead leads the children to maps of human migration across the planet.
I suddenly feel a wave of exhaustion. The physician’s assistant warned me that the pain medication might make me drowsy.
I leave the group behind now to the end of the exhibit on my own.
“Don’t worry. You’re doing great,” the PA told me during the examination, which I thought was funny. Like there was a right way to have a miscarriage. Finally, something I’m good at.
She prescribed me something to speed up the bleeding and something to numb the cramps, and thankfully didn’t once ask how I was feeling.
In the courtyard outside the exhibit, there is an empty bench. I fall down onto it. My bones are so heavy, how can I carry them around? My eyes droop. I let them, too drained to fight my body any longer. It will always have its way.
He stands over his daughter in the fading firelight. In the morning, the group will have to move on, and she will remain here, in this cave, where he will never see her again.
It’s odd to him. His daughter is here, the same small body that gazes up at him with bright eyes. But something is gone. What has disappeared and made her cold and stiff?
He does not yet have a word to describe what happens when his spear strikes a beast in its heart, or when the elders slip away, but he is intimately familiar with it. The group must hunt for survival. He does not grieve when they bring down a beast and tear apart its flesh for meat and pelts. But this one does not feel right. She was too young to get so weak.
In the final days, when the group walked, he carried her. Typically a member so weak would be left behind, but this time, the rest of the group allowed it. She was so light it did not slow him down.
She will never stand or run again, he knows. But in his head, she is still there, her gallop and curious eyes. How? Why? Where has she gone?
He does not like this feeling.
He pulls off the heavy pelt he has on and wraps it over his daughter’s body. She is curled up within it, her eyes shut. If he had not touched her cold, hard flesh, he would have thought she was sleeping. The cave now is cold, especially as the fire turns to embers, but he does not shiver. He digs his fingers deep into the soil. The earth is unforgiving, breaking apart his nails and numbing his fingers, but he must do this.
The beast the pelt came from was ferocious. It gave him the deep scar on his shoulder that still aches on cold nights. It took three men to take the beast down, and it fed the group for several days.
He does not know where she is going, but he does not want her to be alone.