Photo by Imleedh Ali on Unsplash
by Jane Yager
I’m the one who wanted to come here, but now I sit in the car while everyone else goes into the museum, because as we pulled into the parking lot, Dad let slip that the pits are still active.
Mom leaned back through the window as they were leaving and said there was a fence around the tar, but this didn’t reassure me because I know the tar shifted over the course of its eons of trapping unsuspecting animals, so who’s to say it hasn’t oozed out under that feeble chain-link boundary, who’s to say I wouldn’t step into it, and when Mom grabbed me she’d get sucked in too, then Dad ensnared by trying to save her, and finally my brother jumping onto Dad’s back like the Teratorn who fatally alights on the pile-up of sinking creatures on the tar pits page of Prehistoric Monsters Did the Strangest Things?
It’s a hot day and even with all the windows rolled down, the pleather seat starts to stick to my legs, so I swing open the door and step out, looking to the museum building across the shimmering lot, but then I feel the asphalt give a bit beneath my feet, softer than it should be. I lift one sandal and can almost see a faint imprint left behind, so I retreat to the front passenger seat, close my eyes and lean the seat back to focus on feeling whether the tires beneath me are sinking into asphalt.
“Technically the pits aren’t tar, they’re bubbling asphalt,” Dad says when my family returns, bodies unswallowed, brimming with the facts that can be blithely gleaned from informational panels by those with no fear of sinking into sticky oblivion like a doomed Trilophodon with a doomed Smilodon on its back.
“I already know that,” I say, like I know that unsuspecting creatures are who the tar pits prey on, and I’m the opposite, an always-suspecting creature, now scanning the horizon as we pull out of the parking lot, bracing myself for the next trap.
Jane Yager is a writer and translator from California who lives in Berlin, Germany. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Times Literary Supplement, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review, the Coachella Review and elsewhere.
