A Partial Fossil Record
of Things That Never Had Bones

From Greek dis-aster: "bad star." The belief that stars controlled human fate is extinct. The word remains. Every time you say it, you are holding the impression of a worldview that died before Rome fell. The stars do not hear you. You still blame them.

Every border is the negative space of a conquest. A line drawn where armies finally halted and neither side could push further. The armies are gone. The line remains. You cross it with your passport. You are stepping over a fossil.

Spirits lived in trees. Touching the bark, you made contact — asking for protection, acknowledging the presence. The spirits have been gone for longer than most nations have existed, but the gesture persists in people who do not believe in tree spirits, who would laugh at the idea of tree spirits, who nonetheless knock on wood when something good might be taken away.

You extend your right hand. What you are demonstrating: that you are not holding a sword. The sword is gone. The proof of its absence continues. You prove, every day, that you are not doing something you have never considered doing, to someone who has never worried about it.

Seven visible bodies in the ancient sky: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. Each given a day. The gods are dead. The days remain. Saturn's day. Sun's day. Moon's day. Their names are still in your mouth every single week, all your life. You cannot opt out of worshipping the Babylonian sky.

A sneeze expelled the soul briefly, it was believed. The body, soulless for a moment, lay open to possession. A blessing sealed the gap. The belief is gone. The blessing survives. You are still protecting each other from demons. You are still saying so. Neither of you knows.

Every language's grammar is the fossil of how a particular ancient group of people fell into the habit of speech. The grooves they wore into sound, talking around fires and across fields. You think you are speaking. You are also speaking the way people spoke before your language had words for electricity, democracy, or antibiotics. The grammar was already ancient then. You inherited the stone.

In the sediment of legislation, the shapes of extinct anxieties. Statutes against witchcraft, against vagabonds, against the wearing of armor in Parliament. The threat is fossilized. The prohibition persists. Nobody is trying to bring armor into Parliament. The law waits, patiently, in case.

Originally functional: soldiers rolled their sleeves up in the field, the buttons holding the cuff back from blood and mud. Now purely decorative, non-functional, often sewn shut. The sleeves do not roll. The buttons do not open. They are there because they were there. This is most of what decoration is.

This one refuses classification. It predates language, predates civilization, may predate the genus. Whatever it was for — bonding, signaling, processing — it has long since exceeded any original function. It is older than every other specimen in this catalog. It is still breathing. It does not behave like a fossil at all. It behaves like the thing the fossil was made from. Still soft.