Secrets We Tell the Sea by Martha Riva Palacio Obon

Author:Martha Riva Palacio Obon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

8

Typhoons and Trilobites

Many of the nights after the funeral were white-crab nights. Sleepless, Tita would leave the house. Not just on full-moon nights. From her bed, Sofía could hear Tita singing out on the beach. She knew that if she only asked, this time her grandmother would allow her to come along on her nightly walks. But as tempting as it was to learn how to make sand sparkle as only Tita could, Sofía chose to stay in her room. She didn’t even want to talk to the sea—she certainly wasn’t about to sing to it! And she wouldn’t be convinced otherwise.

So Tita went on singing alone.

She sang to lull the sea but also the mermaid living with her.

Sofía, sleepy but unable to sleep, found herself pondering all sorts of new things. Like, for instance, what happened when the trilobites went extinct. But since it isn’t possible to fully understand how something went extinct when you don’t even fully know what the thing is, now’s as good a time as any to learn more about the trilobite.

According to the dictionary, a trilobite is a three-lobed marine fossil arthropod with a flattened oval body divided lengthwise by two grooves.

So a trilobite was actually an arthropod. Okay. But … what the heck is an arthropod?! Sofía wondered.

Well, an arthropod is an invertebrate animal with a segmented body and jointed appendages. Flies, for instance, are arthropods.

Sofía liked to imagine trilobites with fly wings. And after thinking about it some more, she concluded that if those arthropods had not gone extinct, perhaps they would have left the sea altogether and evolved into insects with a tendency to fall into bowls of soup. (Can you imagine? “Mom, there’s a trilobite in my soup!”)

But no. Trilobites never got the chance to evolve, and even less to swim around in anyone’s soup bowl. As Luisa’s book said:

Before their final extinction at the end of the Permian Period, when more than 95 percent of species went extinct, trilobites had already suffered previous episodes of extinction. The Devonian Period heralded these new extinctions. It has been proposed that at least ten of them were due to sea-level changes or possibly asteroid impacts.

So the trilobites hadn’t had it easy. Two weeks after the funeral, Sofía’s first thought each morning was still that her life wasn’t easy, either. It was Monday, and in a few hours, she’d have to go to school. She didn’t want to go back. She was terrified to see her classmates! But Tita insisted it was important to keep moving forward.

Forward toward what?

Sofía couldn’t say. She dragged herself out of bed and stretched. She could make out the sea in the distance, but she’d made up her mind to ignore it. They were no longer friends.

The blue fin lay in a corner of the room. Its twin had been lost two weeks earlier when Luisa had drowned. Sofía thought some more about the trilobites as she got dressed. The book her friend had lent her said they’d suffered previous “episodes of extinction.

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