Supermodels of New Jersey
The Dead Boy 

BY K. ELLS MENARD

The State Museum taught the dead boy that duckbilled dinosaurs roamed the marshy coastland of New Jersey, and thus prehistoric fossils lay beneath all the soccer fields, undeveloped woods, right in the dead boy’s backyard, maybe beneath his driveways’ asphalt. The dead boy I knew also learned that the State Museum could draw lines from star to star to form constellations. That there’s no limit to the forms in the sky. At night, trying to will a dinosaur, the dead boy made connections, always half-frustrated / half-exhilarated that no clear white lines connected the stars when he looked into space. Reclining beneath projections on the domed ceiling of the State Museum’s planetarium, everything clear with scorpions, big and little dippers, bears, and lions above him, all clearly defined with white lines.  

At first, the dead boy felt the State Museum deceived him. No lines between the stars. The State Museum taught him about heavenly scorpions, big and little dippers, bears, and lions, and where were they now? Where were the official constellations? Where were they? Maybe you had to pay the State Museum to see lines drawn between the stars. If the State Museum wanted to mislead, the dead boy decided he would create his own connections rather than struggle to restrict himself to the State Museum’s celestial stick-figures. If the State Museum told him dinosaurs were beneath him, the dead boy would find them above. He would will a dinosaur to appear, following one star to another—that one: a tail-star; that one: a knee-star—and so on, until, by the time he connected all these imaginary lines from a tail-star to a duckbill star, the point he chose to begin drawing the constellation vanished, and all stars became all other stars, closer, brighter, dimmer, farther away. Constellations clouded over, unseen night after night, disappearing above clouds. And when these connections were no longer accessible, the dead boy remembered that dinosaurs were beneath his feet. Or so instructed the State Museum. 

The dead boy started digging in the backyard. Digging and digging. He figured that the potential of finding a dinosaur perfectly preserved obliged him to dig in his backyard. His parents consented, inconceivably, possibly thinking that after trying to cut through the first impeding root, he’d give up on all the drama of unearthing a fossil. Showing respect for his whims and interests, however, the dead boy’s parents let him tear into the backyard. He dug holes all over the backyard, spending hours, forgetting about street football, television, fishing sunfish to throw back into the local pond. A single hole, no matter how deep, could miss a lode of bones just a foot from where he cut. The dead boy found rocks that could be arrowheads. Chunks of triangular stones with hairy roots hanging off them. No fossils. Not even a deer carcass that melted back into the earth. Nothing. Mounds of dirt everywhere, all that labor, an impossible amount of work for a kid, transforming the backyard into an artillery casualty. Some holes went no further than a foot. Like short punctures for a flag pole. Other holes went as far down as the dead boy could dig them.  

One hole he spent two weeks on. Digging hour after hour. The dead boy could stand in it and not even come close to seeing what was around him when he was all the way down. He had to dig steps in the hole’s walls to climb out. For awhile the dead boy thought about closing all the other holes and concentrating only on one, figuring that short diggings only sampled what was just below the surface of the yard. Then he closed them all, packed the dirt back down, because the dead boy knew that if he worked on one and kept with it, he’d eventually find something. He had heard about magma. Down and down and down.  

The dead boy eventually needed to lean a ladder against the hole’s wall to reach the first few steps he dug when the hole became too deep to pull himself out. For awhile the dead boy tried to dig tunnels, a circuit of burrows beneath the backyard. If he began digging out from a place already several feet beneath his annihilated lawn, the chances of finding something would be better than if he just continued digging short holes. If he found nothing at all, only dirt and stones pushed behind him, his work wouldn’t be wasted. He’d have carved an underworld, a subterranean system, a place he could explore or expand, always on the verge of discovering something, always developing, continuing.  

The dead boy wouldn’t dig at night, however. He’d sit at the bottom of the hole and stare up through the portal he cut. He’d see a star or two. Sometimes a cluster of stars would pass overhead and the dead boy would flip them around through various forms, whatever they reminded him of, nothing now symbolic or purposefully charged. He would sometimes say something aloud, and then see if he could draw the lines, make the connections between his words and the stars that appeared in the circle of sky above him. But where did that get him? In a little developing labyrinth, a crypt empty of anything precious, in passages he dug searching for an ancient relative of the mallard. The dead boy looked up at the few stars the sky positioned above him, drawing lines that would disappear as soon as he willed them, his words streaming through a now-buried system of earth. The dead boy I knew used to do this sort of thing a lot, as if that weren’t reason enough.  

On Liberating Flies 
The Ruins