Woohoo! I had this one ready to go for Friday for a change so I get to post it at midnight. Hopefully before it gets drowned in the deluge of #FridayFlash stories.

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Artifacts

"If you're not more careful with that shovel, I'm going to set fire to your comics."

My sister Maggie and I used to play archeologist in our backyard. Playing archeologist consisted of me digging in the squares Maggie had marked off with string while she paced back and forth wearing the pith helmet dad had brought back from some trip abroad, barking orders and snapping the occasional photo with a Polaroid camera. In all of the games we used to play, Maggie tended to end up in the supervisory roles. Despite her being the boss, I was the one who'd been catching shit from our parents for our previous digs. But Maggie wasn't the sort of archeologist who let her little brother getting spanked three times get in the way science so there we were again.

"We're not going to find anything, " I said to her. "We haven't found anything all summer. I don't think our house was built on an Indian burial ground."

It was late August and we would soon be going back to school.

"Keep digging, " she told me. "It's hot out here. I'm going back to base camp for some lemonade."

Base camp was our patio. The square she'd marked off was a metre square and I'd dug down more than a foot.

Maggie was still on the patio, holding a glass of lemonade against her forehead when my shovel hit something hard. My sister heard the clack and hurried over, almost tripping over the string.

"Move! Get out of the way!"

She fetched from the satchel she wore our father's shaving brush and one of mom's garden trowels.

"Go get a drink. Geez, I don't need you looming over me like that."

She went to work brushing away soil from whatever it is I'd found.

"If it's a dinosaur, I'm going to name the species Margaretosaurus, " I heard her say, mostly to herself.

After I'd drank a couple of glasses of lemonade, I carried the empty pitcher to the kitchen and made another one. Maggie had just finished exposing our find when I got back. It was an animal skeleton.

"It's a dog," I said. "The people who lived her before us must have buried their pet our here when it died."

"It could be a coyote," she said. She was crouched down and almost nose to nose with it as she brushed more dirt off. "The Indians used to worship coyotes so our yard is probably a sacred site."

"Mrs. Anderson says we're not supposed to call them Indians."

"That's what they call them in my books."

Our grandparents had given Maggie a set of children's encyclopedia for her birthday, which was what had set off her interest in digging up our yard.

"We should cover it back up," I told her.

She looked up at me with wide, blue and serious eyes and said, "You can't tell mom and dad about this."

Maggie just kept the skull and we buried the rest after she'd taken a few more photos. We hid the skull in the garage and the next day Maggie boiled it in mom's big stock pot to make it look all bleached and white. For years afterwards, I'd fake a stomachache whenever I saw our mother using that pot to prepare something for dinner.

In her second year of university, Maggie was struck and killed by a drunk driver while jogging one evening. I still keep that dog skull on a bookshelf in my apartment. When I have a date over, if she says something like, "Eww gross!" when she sees it, I know the relationship isn't going to last long.

14 responses to "Artifacts "

Laura Eno wrote: Friday, 18 Sep 2009 07:09 Aww...nice twist at the end and very touching.

Kylie wrote: Friday, 18 Sep 2009 08:13 Archaeology and a helmet, I don't think I need anything more then that in a character :D Their child antics are very cute, no fear of a curse on his part I guess!

mazzz_in_Leeds wrote: Friday, 18 Sep 2009 08:24 Too right, all the cool girls appreciate skulls :)

Jodi MacArthur wrote: Friday, 18 Sep 2009 08:43 Any object found during a buried treasure dig is precious. You show that well. Nice write!

Anonymous Reader wrote: Friday, 18 Sep 2009 14:22 Nicely written! I laughed about the stock pot. Yes, I wouldn't want to eat anything cooked in it, either!

Victoria A wrote: Friday, 18 Sep 2009 22:23 Aw, crap, I didn't see that ending coming. Nice work as usual, Dana!

Mark Kerstetter wrote: Friday, 18 Sep 2009 22:29 I enjoyed that.

Shannon Esposito wrote: Sunday, 20 Sep 2009 12:37 Wow, you really know how to provoke a lot of different emotional responses in a small amount of time. I would hope my little brother would keep the skull to remember our childhood bond, too. Nice touch.

J. M. Strother wrote: Sunday, 20 Sep 2009 13:09 I liked it a lot. I was saddened by the ending, but then, that was the point. Nicely done. ~jon

Al Bruno III wrote: Sunday, 20 Sep 2009 15:49 Nice job, bittersweet and amusing.

dan powell wrote: Monday, 21 Sep 2009 00:47 I like the layers of meaning going on here. The skull ending up as a relationship barometer says so much about the type of girl he is looking for. Great stuff.

CJ (hojpoj) wrote: Monday, 21 Sep 2009 20:32 I enjoyed this too - nice voice, simple and clean. I really enjoyed it! Nice touches with the relationship between the kids (3 spankings not deterring her from continued digs) made it very realistic - at least in my experience with siblings. I also enjoyed how even with the sad loss of the sister, you didn't hinge on the sadness but kept the light humor throughout.

chris chartrand wrote: Tuesday, 22 Sep 2009 18:28 Man, this piece was awesome. Funny, touching and superbly written. ~chris

Eric J. Krause wrote: Wednesday, 23 Sep 2009 07:24 Very nice job. A nice mix of amusing and sad.

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