A Matter of Life and Death or Something by Ben Stephenson

“shale” that grenades apart when you throw it, except orangey instead of grey. There were probably so many fossils in there.
    A fossil is a thing, like an animal or something, that gets killed and then trapped in rock, or it becomes rock, I guess, and leaves a statue of itself inside the rock forever, so that later on someone can find it, like a palaeontologist, which is one of the things I will someday be. The palaeontologist will know so much about the rock and the history of the place where it was, and about everything in general, that he or she will know exactly when and where the fossilized animal came from, and maybe even why it became a fossil. Someday when I was older I figured I’d have a car, or probably a bike because bikes don’t use “fossil fuels,” which are bad, and are different than what I am talking about, and I would ride my bike way back out there to the orange rock and collect fossils. Plus, by that time I would have actually invented a type of engine that goes on the back of my bike and runs on another kind of fossil fuels, which would be an engine with a glass box in it that you put a fossil into and lasers scan it and learn everything about it, and the bike wheels are turned by all the wisdom that the bike learns. I would fill my bike up with the fossil fuel and do wheelies back to the laboratory.
    â€œAre we there yet?” Uncle Max said.
    â€œWe’re about ten minutes away,” said Aunt Maxine, and about ten minutes later, we were there. We saw a sign that was wood-coloured with old-fashioned white writing on the front; I couldn’t read it ’cause Maxine speeded by, but it was The Something Family Maple Sugar Farm. We turned off the highway and onto a long curvy driveway.
    Aunt Maxine slammed on the brakes and we stopped at the end of the snowy driveway in front of a log-cabin type house up on a tiny hill, and another barn type thing not much bigger than the house. The two buildings were close together, like the two parts of my old treehouse, except they didn’t have a bridge in between them. There was kind of a circle of nothing around the small buildings, and then after that was trees. Different ones than at our house: skinnier and straighter and darker and taller ones. Through the space between the two buildings I could see a faraway group of people, maybe six or seven of them wearing bright-coloured winter and spring coats, wandering into the woods. Most of them turned their heads around to look at us speeding up in our car.
    The four of us got out of the car at pretty much the same time. The people in the woods were still staring at us but eventually they stopped. Aunt Maxine looked through her purse for something, leaning with her back against the car. Simon took his glasses off his face and wiped them on the bottom of his black coat, squinting. Max stretched his mouth wide open and made the loudest yawn ever. My legs were just waking up, so I jiggled them, and I reached my arms way up over my head to stretch myself out. Then we all walked to the smaller building, Aunt Maxine in front, because she was kind of being the teacher on our field trip.
    I shut the red door behind us. The house was weird inside: it had a tiny front room first with a desk and lots of windows, and then in behind it down a hall were other rooms, like bedrooms and kitchens and bathrooms and things. It was like a family house with an office just nailed onto the front. At the desk there was a girl with shiny brown hair probably in grade nine, leaning over a magazine and chewing. She looked up at us and blew a bubble gum bubble and it popped. She didn’t say anything, as if that bubble was supposed to talk for her.
    So Maxine said, “We’re here for—”
    â€œâ€”The tour. What’s your name?” The girl moved her magazine over to look at a notebook underneath, with things scribbled in it. I thought that she had no idea how lucky she was because