Digital Painting & Illustration
The Palaeontologist
He digs through layers of soil and sediment to reveal the tiny remnants of her. She’s been buried for so long, the earth refuses to let her go. There are sweat beads on his forehead, mud smudges his fingertips and gravel specks lodge deep under the thin moon of his nails. He sweeps the dirt from where it gathers in the curved dip of her hips. Brushes the dust from her femur and her tibia, then pauses for a moment to cup her heel bone gently in his palm. He remembers how she never liked to wear shoes. Remember the soft sound of small feet on bare wood floors. How it echoed all around when she ran while pleading with him to be a dinosaur again.
'Chase me, Daddy. Chase me.'
Her bones are reflected in his spectacles as he tends to the ribs and circles her clavicle with the tip of his brush. He counts her teeth, twenty little milk ones, wobbly and uncertain. Further back, those which will never come through. He speaks softly as if she can hear him, telling her stories like he used to on his good days. Tales of rare, magical creatures who are buried but not lost, just merely waiting to be discovered again. He tells her everything will be okay. He tells her he's stopped drinking. Stopped driving too. Finally, when there’s nothing left to say, he tells her he’s sorry and as he says this, over and over, he lays his head next to her skull and tenderly strokes the hollow of her temple with his thumb.
Text by Sam Payne
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