Shell and Bone

Mr. Miller’s museum was located in a converted filling station on State Road 19, flanked by a grove of dead pines that had been killed by some beetle ten years before. Inside, under neon tubes that hummed like hornets, lay thirty glass cases filled with shark teeth, dugong ribs, and the calcified inner ears of whales that had died when Florida was still a shallow sea. Cora spent her mornings dusting the cases with a feathered wand that left yellow pollen on her knuckles. She liked the quiet of the place, the way the ancient limestone dust settled over everything like a layer of dry milk, muting the roar of the logging trucks outside.

Lately, Mr. Miller had begun to paint his own labels, replacing the neat typewriter print of the previous curator with thick, blue crayon instructions. A mammoth tooth was now labeled "The Tooth of the Great Swamp Lion," and a cluster of Miocene barnacles had become "Petrified Eggs of the River Dragon." Cora didn't correct him; she knew his wife was in the nursing home in Gainesville, and that his daughter only called when she needed money to fix her well pump. In the afternoons, they sat together on two vinyl stools behind the register, watching the rain grease the highway with oil and water.

A car pulled in around four, its wipers squeaking against the dry glass, but the driver only wanted directions to the state park. After they left, Mr. Miller took a large, dark bone—possibly the femur of a Pleistocene tapir—and placed it in the center of the display table. He sat with his hands on his knees, his breathing shallow and rattling, his eyes fixed on the bone as if he expected it to grow skin and rise. Cora reached into her pocket for her polishing cloth, then stopped, realizing that the stories he wrote were the only things keeping the ancient coast from sliding back into the grey Palatka river.