Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: divorce
The Largest Herbivore of the Holocene
In the oldest museum in Sweden, Annaliese keeps her little ones close. Her boys, Kåre and Matthais, weave around pointed protruding rocks while they squabble in whispers about the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. The rocks in question aren’t rocks, but plaster painted in oranges, reds and blacks to replica the French Lascaux caves, its walls covered in a plethora of paintings of extinct animals—dozens and dozens of tails, hooves, horns and scales. The stalagmites, no, stalactites, point at Annaliese like accusing fingers while she steers her boys from the cave exhibit, but she’s not here for the fake rocks, she’s here for the bones.
Her shoes squeak on the polished hardwood and history weighs on her shoulders. A canopy of stars projected on the ceiling dwarfs them under a faux cosmos. They warp and swirl into constellations, scattering and rejoining in rapid time as the projection explains in a sickly-sweet robot voice how stars have shifted over the eras, from the Miocene to the Pleistocene to the Holocene. Annaliese finds herself fidgeting with her pocketed phone until she sees the skeleton lit up in floodlights.
An aurochs. An old beast, extinct for a good five hundred years and then some. Horns as long as her arm. So easily dismissed as the ancestor of cattle, the giant bovine stands on its stage, one thousand kilograms of wild muscle whittled down to wired-together pieces of bone.
Annaliese barely notices Kåre and Matthais slip away to play in the cave exhibit, the mother part of her briefly smothered by the archaeologist keen to be drunk on the secrets the aurochs keeps in its long-gone marrow. The aurochs’ two bony children are wired next to their mother like—
Annaliese closes her eyes as the thought careens by. Like luggage.
She calls her boys back, keeping them close to her side while she pretends to read the aurochs’ exhibit plaque as if she hasn’t visited these bones every day for the past week, or that she knows more about them than any museum guide ever could, or that those other bones her colleagues just uncovered in Scotland might—
A year in Orkney. Maybe. No, definitely not. She shouldn’t. She and Silas only separated two months ago. He moved down the street, and nothing really changed. Annaliese walks the boys to visit their father using the same route she would walk the dog. Silas would offer her tea and genuine smiles, leaving Annaliese to wonder why her divorce, out of millions, was the only one that was dull.
Her phone feels thrice its weight in her pocket because of that one email—the one she’s read a dozen times and swiped back to unread a dozen more—is still in her inbox, overflowing with exclamation points and words like never before seen and exciting opportunity.
But Annaliese could never leave her boys behind. They’re her future, and the aurochs are the past. Herbivores; prey animals; work animals. Long gone and forgotten to time. Even if those newly uncovered bones on the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney are calling to her from across the loch, the seas, and the whole of Europe while she spends her evenings making school lunches, wondering how Gaelic might feel between her teeth.
Someone tugs her hand. Annaliese blinks. Her youngest, Mattias, with the projected stars reflected in his eyes, glances from the aurochs’ skeletons and up at Anneliese through his mop of sandy curls, asking why did the cows die?
A loaded question. Why.
Kåre also waits for Anneliese to answer. But she can’t force out her usual dumbed-down response, the same regardless of whether she’s repeating this to a six-year-old or to people asking about her career as a nicety.
Kåre turns to his little brother and says because they couldn’t adapt to their changing environment. The big adult words struggle to fit in his tiny nine-year-old mouth, his lisp always more obvious when he’s trying to act older, trying to act like his mother.
That’s it. Annaliese can’t leave for Orkney and leave her little ones behind. Her boys need her. Silas might forget to cut their sandwiches into triangles.
Yeah, but why? Matthais prods. Above, the Holocene’s familiar constellations swoosh into the foreign Miocene’s. Different shadows cover the stalagmites in the cave exhibit. No, stalactites. God, she should remember the difference.
Why didn’t the aurochs adapt? The world moved so slowly around them, surely they had time. Did they not see the stars changing above their heads or feel the tectonic plates shifting under their hooves?
This is the career Annaliese built. The family she built, too. It was all she wanted. Like an architect designing a beautiful library without accounting for the weight of the books. And Annaliese is also sinking. Sinking in the silt of understanding that being career-driven means actually having a drive.
Her boys watch her. The aurochs skeleton too, standing tall next to its own children.
Why? Annaliese wants to ask it. Were you too busy looking down at your children to see the stars changing in the sky? Did you also go mad with the not knowing?
She fidgets the phone in her pocket. This aurochs doesn’t know anything. It died not knowing that humans dedicated a whole monument to it in the Jaktorów Forest in Poland because they were the last aurochs left in the world, or that there’s another aurochs exhibit just like this one in the largest museum in Denmark, or that the aurochs are forever remembered in the most famous cave painting to exist.
There’s so much world out there. Maybe there’s enough space that Anneliese can be both the best mum and the best archaeologist in the world. So here, in the oldest museum in Sweden amongst the old and forgotten, Annaliese grips her phone and makes a decision, glancing past the shadows on the cave wall, past her boys, to stare into the empty eye socket of the largest herbivore of the Holocene, who died keeping its little ones close.
Chloe is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from the salty shores of Wadawurrung Country in Geelong, Australia. She is published in a small handful of online and print literary journals, and has won the Elegant Literature Award, NYC Midnight, and has shortlisted multiple times for the Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction. She adores strong verbs, bastardising grammar, and rambling about literary devices to people who truly couldn’t care less. You can find Chloe on Instagram (@chloepaigeauthor) or Bluesky (@chloepaige.bsky.social).
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