the theory of living
my sister’s husband doesn’t believe in dinosaurs. he has a theory — they’re just bones god pulled out of planets when creating the earth (or something like that). i asked him if his hypothesis came after a midnight blunt, my way of saying he was full of shit, which only caused my sister & her husband to gasp! & quote god’s word. for ten, long minutes. after what seemed like an eternity, my sister ended the convo by saying, you never know, maybe he’s right. maybe dinosaurs aren’t real. after that, i joked my anthropology degree was useless & started saying t-rex came from pluto’s moon (a joke no one got). i’d learn throughout time my sister’s husband had strange explanations for a lot of things & i couldn’t argue with him, otherwise a headache would ensue. so when we hear a family friend killed herself, i think he’s gonna have a pseudo-biblical explanation for suicide, but all i hear him say — it doesn’t make sense. it’s like gravity jumped out of her. now, all i am able to think about is what keeps us tethered to earth, our bones or our minds.
JJ Peña is a queer writer. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Split Lip Magazine, Passages North, Into the Void, Hayden’s Ferry, & elsewhere.
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Art August Natterer (cropped) Public Domain
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Jellyfish Review 
