We mutter about it here in our glass case in the hallway. We once lived in the sea and on land. All our adaptations, frozen in stone—our exoskeleton, our spinosity, our miniature eyes. The jawless fish beside us is always whispering, whispering about the great light in the sky, the arrival of more cosmopolitan species. Whispering continually, whispers pouring out of his jawless mouth. 

The living ghosts drift by on the other side of the glass. They can’t hear a thing. We remember the clips and pops of the ancient ocean. We sense the movements of the weather. We are giants, longer than the forearms that rest on the ceiling of our case. We taste the chemoreactions of humans’ love, their fear.

After us came the great fauna, the proliferation of the small animals. We are the foundation of complex life. If we had to choose one word to describe our experience, we wouldn’t. How to speak of the movements of the earth, the supercontinents converging into one? We sing of most species dying, everyone dying around us. We sing of the rich, humid atmosphere incubating plant lives, roots growing up into carboniferous forests, woods we never saw. We sing our own extinction song, calcified and muted, here in the dark. 

We sense our relatives creeping, rustling, swimming through this new world—arthropods, crustaceans, arachnids—without whom, none of this. We hear the heartbeats of those they nourish echoing, joyous, as they stream beyond us out into the light.