D is for dinosaur, p.6
D is for Dinosaur, page 6
part #4 of Alphabet Anthologies Series
The knife plummets.
Cuauhtémoc the Second grunts but does not cry out, eyes fixed upon the widening jaw of the woman above him. Brown flesh splits around obsidian, drawn down his abdomen by hands that are pebbled with scales now. Blood pours from the old Speaker’s belly as plumage bursts from the new Speaker’s brow. The gray of the summit stones, the black of the knife, the pale yellow of the sun grow more brilliant with each blink of her nictitating membranes. Roaring, roaring, roaring the grief she will never be able to speak, Alejandra reaches in, cracks Cuauhtémoc the Second’s ribcage like the soft shell of a crab, and peers down at the beating heart of the demigod who smiles up at her still.
“Beautiful.” He gurgles the word, mouth awash in red.
The priests on the summit gape at her in awe. Silence falls across the quarters of the mourning city-state. The pendulum begins to rise again.
Minsky Prime and Autochthōn Gaea will be hoping to hear from the proxy they fashioned out of a frightened old woman. Alejandra thinks of the proxy she was forced to make of a child when they both might have brought an end to this violence long ago. A silent command to the Keeper sends a volley of missiles to both orbiting ships, and a gesture draws the window she uses to watch them bloom with fire and break apart.
On the altar, Cuauhtémoc the Second groans, delirious with pain.
The Speaker looks down as though she has forgotten he was there. “You’re still alive. Qué interesante.”
She thinks of a faraway grandson and his children, who are safe from her subjects now, and of the people who will lie beneath her knife in the generations to come.
She thinks of Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca, and Tlaloc, whose worship demands such sacrifices.
She thinks of herself and holds the memory of a pale slave girl like a talisman and scourge against the loss of her vanishing humanity.
“People of the city-state, hear me!” Butterfly cameras come to flit above her head. The temple stones reverberate with her voice. “I am Alejandra the First, Speaker of New Tenochtitlan, Cousin of Quetzalcoatl!” One clawed hand reaches in, plucks Cuauhtémoc the Second’s precious eagle cactus fruit, and holds it up, still beating.
“You shall have no other gods before me,” she growls, and swallows it whole.
D is for Duel
Author’s Notes:
The poem excerpt that introduces this story was found in Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico by Miguel León-Portilla on Page 87.
The Aztec and Maya Calendar, found at www.azteccalendar.com, is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. Excerpts are abbreviated from the original.
Gary B. Phillips
EXPOSURE
The act of allowing light to strike a light-sensitive surface.
“Your reputation precedes you,” Martina said. I think she was one of the scientists, but couldn’t be sure. They had led me into the hot little room and introduced me to a dozen scientists, three PR drones, and six lawyers, all on the other side of a long table. Standard intimidation tactic, but I’ve spent hours in the dead of winter within feet of a hungry Siberian tiger so that didn’t faze me. Besides, when you’ve been in this business for as long as I have all the assholes tend to bleed together.
I wasn’t sure if she was referring to my work or everything else. Didn’t really care. I had always lived my life with the idea that every bit of exposure helped, good or bad.
The balding man who had introduced himself as Alvarez, the lead scientist. He shuffled through my portfolio, peering down at it through his bifocals.
“Your work,” he said. “It does speak for itself. As for everything else-”
“Let’s not get into that,” Martina said. “Let’s focus on his work.”
The rest of them murmured amongst themselves.
“What makes you think you can do this job?” Alvarez asked.
As if my work spread out before them didn’t speak volumes. Is a picture worth a thousand words or isn’t it? The Pulitzer, the National Geographic issues dedicated to my work, the worldwide acclaim, and mansion that came with it all. The bastards had already made me sign my life away before I could even talk to them and it still wasn’t good enough?
“I’m not doing it for me,” I said.
They scoffed at this as if I had ruined their little circle jerk.
“Exactly, you’re doing it for us,” Martina said, with a warm smile. I don’t know why she kept trying to defend me when it was clear they all hated me, but I chose to keep my mouth shut.
Alvarez spoke again. “You must understand the importance of this project. This is how I will show my creation to the world. All the work you’ve done in the past, as impressive as it is, will mean nothing after this. You will capture the world’s imagination with these photographs. Your name will go down in the history books.”
An impressive speech, no doubt the same one he had given to every other photographer that had been in this seat. They asked a few more questions before abruptly ending the interview.
“We’ll be in touch,” they said.
None of them stood up to shake my hand. I grabbed my portfolio and shoved it into my bag. Wrenched off my tie before I had even gotten out of the room. I had almost escaped the building when Martina caught up with me.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “They’re critical of everyone. You must understand how important this is.”
I wanted to be home, or better yet, find a bar and drink it all away. The job didn’t matter anymore, but in the back of my mind there was my little girl and the light in her eyes. It would have mattered to her. I forced a smile.
“Of course,” I said.
“As a kid I think I had every National Geographic you had ever been published in. I was obsessed. My parents bought me all three volumes of America, Undressed for Christmas when I was fourteen.”
“First editions?”
“Yes. Still have them.”
“Probably worth a small fortune now.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll never part with them. My mother thought for sure that I would be a photographer, but your wildlife photography inspired me in a different way. I wanted to save the endangered animals. Ended up going into Genomics which led me here. I owe it all to you.”
“Probably a good choice,” I said. “Photography is one percent taking pretty pictures and ninety-nine percent dealing with douchebags. Present company excluded.”
She laughed and hugged me.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m fighting for you.”
“They’re not,” I said.
“You’re the best for the job. I know it.”
“Am I? My eyesight is shit. My hands can barely hold the camera without shaking.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “That’s why they have tripods.”
I laughed. First laugh in too long and it burned at my throat. I could really use that drink.
“Every shit-grinning photographer in the world wants this job,” I said. “They want their shot to make their mark, to do what I’ve done. They want to make history, as your boss says. He’ll balk at my price or my attitude or hate the tie I chose to wear today. They’ll fight me every step of the way... But I’ll give you the best goddamn photograph of a dinosaur in the world.”
APERTURE
The mechanism that controls how much light passes through a lens and onto film.
I was a wealthy man. My work had been published in National Geographic, my exhibits toured the world, and made me a mint. I thought I had it all. And then Olivia was born and she showed me, as only a child can, how poor I had really been. The truth was, I didn’t have shit before I had her.
Ten perfect fingers and toes and the light in her eyes when she smiled at me, and that was all it took to bring me to my knees. As if my slate had been wiped clean. She was my aperture.
Like every kid in the world she loved dinosaurs. Even at four months old her tiny hand grasped the soft blue felt blanket with the smiling dinosaurs on it that my sister had given to her while explaining that “dinosaurs were for girls too.” I had never understood our culture’s fascination with the extinct monsters. Those oversized lizards, or birds, or whatever they were had never appealed to my own lizard-bird brain. Olivia, though, she loved them and by the transitive property so did I.
Martina called me three days after the interview. I had stayed in Seattle to imbibe at my favorite watering hole. I stepped out of the darkened bar and into the drizzling rain to take her call.
“We’ve awarded you the contract,” she said, with a pause that sounded a little too uncomfortable for my taste. I waited for the other shoe to drop. There’s always another shoe. “There is some bad news.”
“Lay it on me.”
“They don’t believe you can do the job. They’ve hired another photographer as backup.”
I wasn’t surprised. I laughed and told her to wish the other photographers good luck.
The next morning I boarded a plane to San Francisco. I had been staying with my sister and working on a new project that would show the hypocrisy of the city; the new tech that had turned the Golden City into a hub for the hottest businesses and the geniuses that flocked there while bleeding the city of its true people. The pictures came easy, on each street corner. A mentally ill homeless person begging for change next to a Tesla. That sort of thing.
Even with the new project, and the chance at helping to show the world a dinosaur, I still only thought about Olivia and how I could make her proud, do her right. Assuming I didn’t fuck it all up. She would want all the details about how they made a real, live dinosaur. Alvarez had tried to explain it, but even with his simple high-level overview it was pure science fiction wankery to me. Impressive as it all was they needed me to help tell their story. The funny thing about photographers though, is that we’re the world’s best liars. What you see in the photograph is not the truth. There’s always a real story and it’s usually just off-frame. The picture of the starving child and the waiting vulture is one story, but there’s another story we may never know. Sometimes it ends with one end of a hose taped to a truck’s exhaust and the other end going through a rolled-up window until it’s all over at thirty-three years old.
SHUTTER SPEED
The mechanism that controls the length of time that the film is exposed to light.
I touched down in San Francisco International just as the sun was coming up glinting off the buildings and turning the fog snow white like a blanket draped across the bay. I Uber’d to my sister’s house, told her the good news, and was back at the airport three hours later. I packed light: My camera and trusty old Canon 50mm lens, a telephoto lens that I had no intention of using but brought for show. A few standard bounce boards, white, gold, and silver. An on-camera fill flash. And a couple of cheap disposable cameras for Olivia’s approval. The other photographers would likely be picking quality prime telephoto lenses so they could just stand back and click a button. Easy mode. That wasn’t my style. I wasn’t going to taking a fucking Olan Mills portrait.
Life moves so fast. I used to tell people that’s why God gave us such fast shutters, but that was a long time ago and I haven’t been a believer in a long time.
A fast shutter allowed humanity to see things that we were never meant to. Pause time, freeze a hummingbird in mid-air. Hell, photography itself was just another way for man to try and ward off death, to allow ourselves to live forever. That fight was a struggle as old as time. You can’t live forever, though, I knew that all too well.
Olivia had been another reminder of my own mortality. She learned to walk at six months old. She never cared for crawling, just pulled herself up on our ratty couch and started walking as fast she could until she reached the edge of the couch and tumbled back down. After that I chased her around the house every day snapping pictures of her laughing, chasing the cat, and generally just being the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
Capturing a dinosaur would be so much easier than Olivia at three, tearing through the house on one of her juicebox-fueled benders. It was hard work keeping up with her but she brought me so much joy. The beauties that I had captured of the animal kingdom paled next to her smile as wide as a canyon, deep sea blue eyes, and golden sunkissed hair. I didn’t know beauty until I saw her, and my photographs have been lauded as the most beautiful in the world.
FILTERS
A mechanism used to modify the image.
The subtle use of a filter can change the color or contrast of an image. Reshape what the viewer sees. I only brought a polarizing filter to protect my lens. Sure, it had the added benefit of filtering out any pesky reflections, but unless the dino was made of glass I didn’t think that would be a problem. Filters are just another way to change the story, to tell a lie, which I had never had any interest in with my photographs.
Filters had saved my lenses from dozens of falls and brushes with death thanks to Olivia’s wandering fingers. It was always cheaper to let a cheap filter take the brunt of damage than a lens that cost the price of a used car.
When she was born I promised myself I would never let her touch my prize cameras, the ones that gave me my living. Of course, any parent can tell you what happened next. It didn’t take Olivia long to turn the tables on me and start chasing me around the house with my own camera, snapping blurry photos of me. Our house was filled with the photos she took. First, just pictures of my feet as she chased me. Slowly her framing and patience got better and one day she ran in from playing outside to tell me she’d taken her first picture of a butterfly on a flower after waiting ten minutes for it to land next to her.
The photos she took were as honest as it got. The truth of the world was inside the frame of the picture, not hidden away like in so many professional photos. Nothing was filtered out when she had the camera. She waited patiently for the perfect moment with one eye open outside the frame to find the truth of the story, that emotional moment when life coalesced in that perfect way it did so rarely. She taught me everything I knew about making true art.
I tried to emulate her, but could never get rid of those bad habits, the hidden truth that was always just outside of the frame—editors and lawyers always have their say. The hidden truth was that he had chased that vulture away from the starving child, but it didn’t matter, because the world only believed what they saw in the finished product.
LIGHT
And Photographers said, Let there be light: and there was light.
A lot of photographers will bring bounce cards and lights wherever they go. Even at the golden hour, they’ve always got a crew hauling equipment, whatever they can do to make their shot more perfect. Sunlight is all I ever needed.
My daughter had been the source of light in my life through the dark times. I had spent too long in hell, photographing the atrocities of mother nature and mankind alike and then drowning myself in a bottle. That was before Olivia. After she was born I got clean because she was always waiting for me when I came home, arms outstretched to hug my legs.
The plane touched down in Buenos Aires. They told us it would be a five hour drive from there to our destination. I hadn’t spent more than half an hour in a car in fifteen years and I damned well didn’t want to start now. I offered to charter a helicopter, but they just told me to shut up and get in.
I tried to sleep, but the narrow two-way roads freaked me out, and I was wide awake, trying not to pay attention to how fast we were going and how close the cars in the other lane were.
The sky was stormy and the clouds blotted out the stars. The only light was from the cars and it wasn’t enough to give me comfort. The terror of it all made my thoughts turn to Olivia and that eerily similar night so many years ago.
It had been so fucking dark on that road. We had been driving from a shoot in San Francisco back home to Los Angeles.
She was in the backseat screeching like a dinosaur and begging me to drive past home and take her to Cabazon Dinosaurs. I was tired and already uncomfortable with having brought her along, hoping she hadn’t annoyed my client too much, but happy enough with the work I had done. We were on the part of the California 99 that is only two lanes, one north and one south.
The semi drifted into my lane and I swerved to avoid it. My tires hit dirt and we fishtailed. Then I lost control and we slammed back into the eighteen wheeler.
I remember the sound of the screeching tires, the exploding glass, my own voice calling the driver an asshole again and again, but most of all I remember the way Olivia screamed, louder than the crash itself.
When we finally stopped spinning the world had grown black around us. The dome light had busted and I couldn’t see anything. There were no freeway lights but I was pretty sure we had ended up a ways off the road. I looked back at my daughter and saw her face in the passing light of the cars that didn’t bother to stop. Her face was black, like it was sucking in the light and my brain couldn’t understand why, couldn’t process it. Finally it clicked.
It was blood.
I scrambled out of the car. The semi that had hit us was nowhere to be seen and the road had grown dark again without any passing cars. I stumbled to the back of the car, crunching on gravel and broken glass and ignoring the pain in my leg. I opened the door and reached for her.
She was silent. Still clutching her favorite blanket, the one with the happy dinosaurs on it and looking up at me with fearful eyes that pleaded with me to help her. There was so much blood and I could see it pouring from the mess of her head, thick and dark.
“Let me see the blanket, baby,” I said.
