SHE PROBABLY DIDN'T MEAN IT — DANA LIEBELSON
/You often go to the dinosaur museum to avoid your mother. You eat edibles and sit in the planetarium and watch the Pink Floyd laser show. You touch the bronze bones of Big Mike. You lick golden lollipops from the gift shop with preserved mealworms. You dance the scroll of deep time, humanity reduced to a sliver of paper on the wall. Deep time makes you dizzy, like the first time you realized your mother would die (during Titanic, the part where the Irish woman puts her children to bed before they drown; you were nine.) In the museum, there is a small dark room where the curators play boring black-and-white films of scientific experiments. This is your favorite room. If you cry, no one else is ever in here to ask why your sad breath smells of insects.
Ernst Chladni was a German contributor to the field of meteoritics, says today’s boring film. He collected reports of rocks dropping from the sky, and in 1794, published a book theorizing that they come from space, according to Meteoritics & Planetary Science. At the time, he was dismissed for grounding his evidence in stories considered to be “folk tales,” the journal reported. You wonder aloud (stoned): How do you prove a fireball that only burns in your mother's memory? The narrator does not answer your question. Chladni is also credited with this experiment where he put sand on a plate and drew a bow across the plate, causing the sand to leap into patterns, the narrator continues. Through the speakers, the hair of the violin bow whispers like the devil, but the trembling designs look to you like maps drawn by someone’s God.
There’s something wrong with you, your mother said. The words play in your head like a car stereo thumping in the distance. You see the vibrations of your mother’s voice, shifting sand into shapes. There’s something wrong with you. The shape of her frozen red mouth, smiling even when she is angry. The shape of “good enough," a resonance not reached. The shape of her white cowboy boots, which you are wearing now to be more “beautiful.” There’s something wrong with you. In deep time, femurs last longer than words and you never feel alone at the dinosaur museum. You stand and smooth your frayed jean skirt. As you leave for home, you imagine tipping over Chladni’s plate, the magical pattern falling through your fingers; it’s just sand.
Dana Liebelson is an M.F.A. candidate in creative writing at the University of Wyoming. Her journalism has appeared in HuffPost, Mother Jones and The Atlantic. She grew up in Bozeman, Montana.
