Despite the two hundred and fifty-two million years that separate us, I feel close to you tonight, dear trilobites. The wind screams through the cracks in my home, while you rest in stone on my oaken desk worn soft by generations. You have a firmness I lack, an endurance, a permanence.

I have studied you my entire life, but I am closest to you on this night, dear trilobites, as the worst of a string of hurricanes rages. A string of hurricanes! In Donegal! My mam would’ve never believed it. This night of watching pixels like prophets, refreshing my tiny window screen out into the world while our real windows are boarded up by my inexpert hammering. This night of watching the flailing savagery of politicians devouring what remains of the carcass of state until my battery is after dying, and the darkness drops again.

The power has been out for hours, no hope for a new charge. No hope at all, really, not when my son lies dying on the couch downstairs, asleep under triceratops print sheets, shivering with the latest plague, and I cannot bring myself to feel anything about it. I ought to be weeping on the floor, but I just sit upstairs with my candle, my paper, my pen, and you. As detached as my ancestors. Dying alone together.

But I can’t stop thinking about you, dear trilobites. Back when I had colleagues, they used to joke that I was your number one fan. I still am. I still am that, at least. I remember well your early Cambrian phase and I stuck with you all the way through the Permian, when the rest of the paleontologists became obsessed with tetrapods.

My work studying you is gone, all professional obligations long past. My thoughts for you are about love, then, and survival. You thrived. For approximately two hundred and seventy million years you thrived. You succeeded in all that the world asked of you: to live and reproduce. You were glamorous, hard-bodied, impervious. You remain glamorous, bequeathing to us fleshy apes the beauty of your exoskeletons. Hard curves and ridges and spines, like horseshoe crabs or the slaters we poked until they balled up and we rolled them around the driveway, back when my son was little and his hair was cornsilk soft and he was not downstairs dying.

I feel like I am with you now, dear trilobites, down in the silent sea. I want to be with you. It’s quiet here, because of the endless sound, the unseen pounding sheets of rain, the wind’s mad screaming. White noise, white as the skin of a ghost, and I can let it wash over me and I can imagine I am down in the deep with you.

We are so close, you and I. I have seen your face, your faces, more than I have seen my own in the mirror. I saw your face every day for decades. Days when I did not see my now-dead husband, days when I did not see my own child, even on those days I saw you, studied you. My profession knows only one story—the dogged pursuit. So I pursued you, catalogued you, wrote about you, thought about you, talked about you. Touched you.

Two hundred and fifty-two million years have passed and here, frozen in stone, your three-lobed form, axis and pleurae, is still perfectly preserved. Your spines and segments, glabella, the hypostome across your mouth, your compound eyes, your free and fixed cheeks, all remain. Two hundred and fifty-two million is a number so large our ape brains numb to it, uncomprehending. It is the same as five million or five hundred billion, unfathomable as oceans. It is the number of us already dead. It is the species upon species extinct. It is an unknowable greatness of distance, of time, of total, irreversible loss.

In less than one year, my child and I will be nothing more than bits of scattered bones and teeth. In less than one thousand years, this house of stone, my family home built back when this land was called Tír Chonaill, will be only rocks again. In ten thousand years, this whole island will be shifted beyond recognition or simply gone, sunk down to nothing at all. In a hundred thousand years, only more nothing. Take that hundred thousand years, and bring it again and half again. Two hundred and fifty-two million years. I still cannot hold the number in my head. It wriggles away and sinks down into endless silence.

In this moment I have my eyes, my mouth, my skin, my hair, my bones, the woven woolly carpet beneath my cold and naked feet, this oaken desk worn soft, this cheap, guttering candle, this pen, this letter, my child dying downstairs, coughing in his sleep. I have my inability to walk downstairs and take my child’s little hand in mine, to read old tales to him from his favourite of my mother’s books, The Ashes of Old Wishes, or tell him stories of Tír na nÓg, the land of eternal youth, or even just to sit with him sleeping beneath his triceratops sheets, to be close to him. Because I know if I try, if I take one step down those stairs, I will break. I will shatter into two hundred and fifty-two million pieces and there will be no one to pick them up, no one left to study them.

It will all be gone soon anyway. My eyes, my mouth, my skin, my hair, my bones, the carpet, my feet, the desk, the candle, the pen, the letter, my child, my inability, my mother’s book, the stories, my weakness, my life. It will all be gone so soon, between one breath and the next.

Except for you, dear trilobites.

You will remain. Glamorously armoured, perfectly impenetrable. Impervious to the last.

Editor: Austin Dewar

First Reader: Joyce Chng

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors