Ossa

My father’s ghost assured me I wouldn’t fail the test.

Sitting next to a girl who liked to cheat by writing things on her tampon package, I wondered if I should feel more or less guilty than her. She was making an effort to do the wrong thing, whereas I had no say over whether or not my dead father appeared to me during an exam.

The girl’s name was Chima, but everyone called her Chi Chi. She lived in the next dorm room over from me, and for most of the previous spring semester, she had been sleeping with my roommate until she decided that she didn’t like girls after all.

“Nothing against your roommate,” she said, “But it just wasn’t for me.”

Chi Chi told me that if her professor was a man, she’d use the tampon box as a cheating tool. She surmised that if the professor saw what she was doing, maybe the mere existence of tampons would be enough to prevent them from willingly catching her in the act.

“What if it’s a woman professor,” I asked.

“Oh, if it’s a woman teaching the class,” she said, “Then I study.”

My father didn’t care for Chi Chi, but then again, he disliked most of my classmates. I was an accidental daughter. He got my mother pregnant on a dig in San Juan. Shortly after having me, my mother turned into a rather large lizard and tried to eat me. My father saved me, but there were days during my childhood when I wished that he hadn’t. Growing up without a mother while accompanying the third most famous paleontologist in the world on trips consisting of sand, bone, and bad wine was not even remotely close to the ideal childhood. Most of the time, my father spoke to me as though, at any moment, someone would be coming along to fetch me and bring me to my real parents who would know what to do with me.

“You’re always underfoot,” he’d say to me when we were back in our tent after a long day in the heat, “I know you’re only six, but you must learn to make yourself scarce. Turn into an insect, if you must. It might just pass the time.”

We both knew that the reason I wouldn’t do any kind of transforming was because I was afraid that I wouldn’t turn back. My mother had stalked the camp where I was born as a lizard for a few days before growing bored and disappearing into the jungle. My father assumed that she’d one day turn back and come find us, but that never happened. It seemed that she enjoyed being a reptile more than being a mother. I once turned my fingernails into claws, but that was as far as I went in terms of adopting a different form.

When I turned eighteen, my father was notified that the first and second most famous paleontologists in the world had died at sea in separate boats. Both of them were headed to investigate the alleged appearance of elephant bones in the South Pacific. Elephants had been extinct for nearly a thousand years, but their bones were turning up all the time. My father, now being the most famous paleontologist in the world, was determined to succeed where his former colleagues had failed. He set sail on a Tuesday, and by Thursday, I was receiving visits from his ghost.

“Don’t you dare throw me a funeral,” he said, as I attempted to make myself a fajita, “I am not dead until I say I’m dead.”

“Clearly, you’re dead,” I replied, “You’re a ghost. Unless you’re a hallucination?”

“I might be a hallucination.”

“Are you only saying that because you don’t want to admit that you’re a ghost?”

“Did you cut your hair? It looks terrible.”

I had cut my hair a month earlier, but he hadn’t noticed. It turns out a dead father is a much more astute father. He noticed everything now. My hair, my weight, and, most of all, my grades.

“Why are you taking archeaology and not paleontology,” he asked me as I was walking home from a meeting of my Historical Fiction Book Club.

I admitted that I had thought they were essentially the same thing.

“No,” he moaned, as though the shackles of the Underworld were chafing his thighs like a pair of skinny jeans, “Paleontologists study fossils to find out what’s what. Real matter. The stuff of bones. Archaeologists go around trying to learn about what happened in Pompeii by digging up Italian nonnas.”

“But human bones are still bones, aren’t they?”

“Human bones,” he said, nearly spitting out the phrase, “Are the McDonald’s of the bone kingdom. Very basic. Very one, two, three. You, my love, are built for bigger and better things.”

That was the first time he called me “love.” It was the first time I had ever heard him utter the word “love” aside from the time he found a complete set of hamster bones in a village outside of Tibet. It was shortly after this that my father began helping me get through university.

“There’s no reason to half-step it,” he said one afternoon, as I was shaving my legs, “We’ll have to skip right to the most effective method of getting you your degree.”

“Which is?”

“Cheating,” he said, with a dash of condescension as if it should have been the most obvious thing in the world, “The sooner we get you through school and grad school, the sooner I can help you begin to build a real career. And the sooner we can try once more to find those elephant bones.”

“The ones you died trying to find,” I asked.

“That was simply bad luck,” he said.

“Do you want to tell me exactly what happened?”

“It would only upset you,” he replied, “But suffice it to say, dolphins are nowhere near as friendly as they are in the movies.”

I had never seen a dolphin in a movie, but that was because we were never anywhere near a movie theater when I was growing up. The closest I ever came was a puppet show outside Bucharest where the puppets were made out of goat skulls.

There was no good way to tell my father’s ghost this, but I had no intention of becoming a paleontologist. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I didn’t want bones involved in any way, shape, or form. After Chi Chi broke up with my roommate, she left college to go work as a rider with the centaur community on Deimos, and I thought that sounded like fun. It had also occurred to me that I could simply turn into a magpie and fly off into the night. Whether I turned back was of no concern to me now that I was a grown-up, but the trouble was, my father would be able to find me no matter where I went. There was no way around telling him the truth.

The day of my paleontology exam, he stood behind me as the professor passed out the ninety-seven sheets of paper that would make up our test.

“Write your name,” my father’s ghost said, as though I had never taken a test before, “But not until he says it’s alright. I don’t want you losing points over something foolish like that.”

When the test began, Chi Chi took out her box and began looking at the answers. I saw the professor clear his throat, but once she shook one of her tampons at him, he quickly looked back down at the divorce papers he’d brought with him to study while he waited for us to finish.

“The answer to Question 1 is Ossa,” my father said, “I’m sure you already knew that, but as long as I’m here, I may as well make quick work of this.”

And make quick work of it, he did. Had my father’s ghost been able to hold my pencil, I’m sure he could have completed the entire exam in under twenty minutes. I glanced over at Chi Chi who was still struggling with the essay section. There are many ways to cheat, but this section was meant to be personal. It asked us why we think it’s important to study ancient life.

I looked down at what I was dictating. My father had already helped me fill two thirds of a page. His essay began as such--

“Ah, paleontology. A field, I daresay, far too often dismissed by the plebeian masses as mere fossil-hunting. But let me disabuse you of that notion immediately. The study of ancient life, you see, is not merely a quaint hobby; it is the very bedrock upon which our understanding of this planet’s profound history rests. Without it, we would wander through existence blissfully ignorant of the grand tapestry of evolution, blind to the colossal shifts that sculpted our world, and utterly bereft of context for our own fleeting presence. Indeed, to neglect such a venerable discipline is, quite frankly, an intellectual failing of the highest order. One truly must possess a certain gravitas to appreciate its true worth.”

“Papa,” I said, “This sounds a little stiff.”

“It should,” he said, “I’m using AI to help write it.”

“What?”

“My love, I don’t have time to come up with something about the meaning of paleontology on the spot. I never had to write essays explaining why untangling the mysteries of the Universe is important. It’s an inane question. It deserves an inane approach.”

“How are you even--?”

“Ghosts have premium access to ChatGPT,” he said, “It’s one of the perks of being dead.”

He went back to regurgitating his essay, but I was already beginning to shift in my seat. My skin had become scratchy and discolored. My nose had turned inward only to pop out the way fake snakes might out of a gag box. My hands had coalesced into something of a hammer, and my feet soon followed. Chi Chi looked over at me, and immediately dropped her tampon box.

My father was so engrossed in my exam that he didn’t notice my metamorphoses until it was nearly complete. By then, the rest of my classmates had shrunk back in horror. Even the male medusa who was always asking me if I wanted to go to a party at his frat. The professor had gathered up his divorce papers and fled the room. When the ghost finally looked up at me, I almost detected a smile on his translucent face.

“An elephant,” he said, floating up towards my new mouth, “You’re an elephant now.”

I nodded. Speech would no longer be available to me.

“Well,” my father’s ghost said, “I’d say this was a success.”