Trilobite

*This poem is another piece I wrote while in college. It has undergone a few edits.*

They found it in the attic, shoved in the corner of a half-empty cardboard box. Shaped like a flattened egg, like a tailless horseshoe crab, graphite gray, a series of carpet-creases slinking down its back. “This used to be alive,” her father said, tossing it up, from palm to palm. Bury it then, she thought, her eyes leaping from the fossil to the insulation-wound still waiting for drywall-suture to the fossil again. “Millions of years ago. Little terror of the sea floor,” he continued, smiling at it, then at her. “Here.” He placed it in her hands, cradled, the weight scratching with insect-prickles up her arms, burrowing behind her eyes to pupate. The nightmares: it molted like a cicada, crawling on centipede legs, pincers at her ankles. She cocooned it in mud only to wake up to it by her bed, clumps of clay crusted into eyespots. “Take it back,” she cried to her father. He laughed, ruffled her hair and sat it atop his desk, turning it so she could feel its stare.