I hold open my hand for bloom but feel only burst. 

My grandmother’s garden is an oasis in the desert, a small bit of land behind her house that stretches toward an empty meadow like it is running away. The garden is a lush growing field for towering sunflowers and hollyhocks, sweet roses and ranunculus. A sprawling tree provides shade in a space the sun usually leaves bleached and leached. I stand under it sometimes, branches casting shadows on my girl body while I listen to shouting inside, the sounds of my angry grandfather and my skittish grandmother. When the fighting gets too bad, she flits outside like a butterfly drawn to all that luscious color, and we watch the flowers turn toward the light while we pretend everything is alright.

My grandmother’s favorite flowers are snapdragons, bold pink like pain or the creamy apricot of an apology. When I am a child still learning how to walk, she shows me how the bloom opens like a secret or a sorry, shows me how I can hide my finger inside like safety. 

And then she shows me how easy it is for something you love to snap.

~

At the children’s museum, I love the dinosaurs best. I like that they are armored and cold. I like that nothing can hurt them. I even like that they are dead.

I stand for a long time in front of displays of brontosaurus and stegosaurus, my favorite dinosaurs because they are both fearsome and gentle. I don’t understand why everyone prefers the tyrannosaurus rex, a bully with a big mouth because his arms are too small. I never understand why some need to lead with teeth.

“Out of the way, little girl,” says a father who is not mine. He pushes a little boy in front of me, teaching us both who has the right to claim space. “Now there’s a dinosaur,” he says, pointing to the T-Rex. “Imagine being like that.”

In the reflection of the display glass, I watch the boy. He is bored by the dinosaurs, or perhaps his father, and stares instead at the tiny finches who have managed to sneak inside the museum, whistling as they attempt to find a way out. I watch the father stab his finger at the glass as if to trap something underneath.

And then I watch my own reflection as I back away, frightened and confused, retreating to a place where I belong—the room with the dollhouses or the coloring books of flowers—even though I want to be wild.

~

I pull weeds up by the roots, severing them from the soil. At my aunt’s house, I earn chocolate chip cookies by helping around the yard. Our hometown is barren, full of tumbleweeds and cacti, even the land lifting up and away from itself in great dust clouds to drift somewhere better. But my aunt, like my grandmother, is a glorious gardener, and she has managed to grow great beds of gladiolus. They send purple shoots high into the sky on stocks so thick even the merciless wind cannot snap them. 

I try to remember their sweet fragrance when I go inside for lunch or to use the restroom, my uncle reeking of cigarettes and cheap beer, bad breath and cologne that clings to me after he insists I sit on his lap, give him long hugs, tell him how much I love him. I hate going inside, where it is dark, where I am scared. I want to stay in the sun. I want to stay with the flowers even when pulling weeds blisters my palms and leaves a callous thick as a dragon’s skin.

But no one listens to a little girl. Instead, I am to obey orders, to be good, to be quiet, to pay attention and not ask questions no matter how many times I have heard his stories about fighting wars in deserts far away, about riding in armored tanks, about flinging fire and smoke into the sky. But I don’t need anyone to tell me about camouflage. I don’t need anyone to tell me about hiding in plain sight. 

Sometimes I cry when I am gardening. I don’t know if this is because I am tired and it is hot. I don’t know if this is because I am scared and long to go home where it is safe. I don’t know if this is because sometimes I accidentally pull up a flower by mistake, the bulb splitting in two from the force of trying to grow in this arid place. But sometimes, when I cry, alone and shaking in the yard, I think it is because my aunt has worked so hard to make something beautiful here.

~

My little friend pees himself like a scared animal. The kids at preschool already tease him, so I keep quiet, even though his room smells of piss and the lizards he keeps as pets. They glow orange and red under the warming lights.

I visit him sometimes because we both love dinosaurs and our mothers both love talking over coffee. His house is filled with beautiful plants his mother tends, including vines that line the shelves in his room, making it feel like a Jurassic jungle. We take turns naming off dinosaurs, listing facts about claws and eggs, herbivores and carnivores, dragons that look like birds and one whose frilly neck ruffle reminds me of a pansy. 

He is younger than me, but I think my friend is brilliant for memorizing so much information about something that has been dead for so long. I could listen to him talk all day, but he never says anything after his dad comes home. Instead, he goes quiet like his mother, both of them listening to his father, who is a preacher and a florist, warning about fire and brimstone, a fearful God who makes even Eden frightening.

I do not like listening to his father, a man who talks big and loud and full of importance about the origins of man while he denies the fossil record. He laughs at his son for believing in dinosaurs like they are the same fantasy as wizards and dragons. He tells him to toughen up even though he arranges flowers for a living, presents his family with discarded dying plants or broken stalks hanging their heads. When his son cries, he tells him to be a man. He comes home holding a Bible or a bouquet and ignores the truth, just like we ignore his son’s smell of scared piss, his wife’s black eye.

~

In elementary school a boy smashes my project under his small hand. We are making art with clay, warming it with our bodies until it is soft and pliable, shaping it with our strength to make whatever it is we desire. I have crafted a dinosaur diorama. I’ve made a triceratops and a velociraptor, even a pterodactyl perched on a clay tree as if to fly away.

I corrected him. The boy did not know the proper name for a dinosaur, and when I showed him in the book I checked out from the library, he flattened my creation under his shame.

“Just make it again,” the teacher says when I show her what he has done. “There’s no reason to cry.”

So I break the bodies down. Soften what was once solid. Attempt to start over.

~

Down I go, crashing into darkness.

At the state fair, I ride the dragon roller coaster, the only big girl ride my mother will allow, because she knows how much I love these monsters. The coaster rolls up to fall back down, plummeting into black pierced with red flashing lights like fire. The ride is rickety, rattling me in my skin until even my bones do not seem solid.

Because I am a scared child, I will not ride without my uncles, rough men who work in aeronautics, welding metal machines together so people can soar in the sky. They drink too much and laugh too loud and smoke so often it seems there is fire in their mouths, billowing when they speak. They make jokes my mother says I am not allowed to hear, call women bitches and whores, laugh about putting old girlfriends in their places. But I know my place, quiet at their side. I know what I must do to make them love me.

When my father’s brothers visit from another state, we eat cotton candy and hotdogs. We walk through stalls of farm animals trapped before slaughter and through garden displays of bright flowers bursting in the sky like fireworks. We throw darts at balloons and toss rings into fish bowls to try and win me a pet. When we fail, they buy me a tiny foam lizard attached to a wire hanger like a leash. We take turns walking my dinosaur though the fairgrounds.

When at last I am brave enough to sit next to them on the ride, they smell of alcohol and cigarettes and sharp sweat, but I take the twists and turns with them. I plummet into the void.

~

“Do you want to see something impossible?” asks my father. He leans over to pat my leg so that I will stop staring away from him out the car window.

In middle school I am quiet. I have learned this is what the world wants from a girl— shyness, submission. No one likes a know-it-all, a tattletale. No one wants to see a girl cry because the history teacher insisted knights and warriors are projects for boys, queens and English gardens topics for girls. No one wants to hear about a girl’s mad, sad, bad. These are artifacts to tuck away like petals pressed behind glass, fossils trapped in tar.

“Look carefully,” my father says, pointing out his driver’s seat window. At first all I see are old oak trees, impossibly gnarled. I see the dry California hills golden like fire. Because we are near the beach, succulent ice plant drips color like a strange jungle.

“Look closer,” my father says, motioning through the trees. And then there they are—a dozen dinosaurs towering as if in real life. They are as tall as museum models, living creations, history come back from the dead. 

My father tells me an artist lives here, a collector who has filled these acres with roaming dinosaurs. They are easy to spot, if only you know how to look.

I hold my breath and study them closely. I can’t believe I missed them before, hiding in plain sight.

~

My grandmother plants spectacular color after my grandfather dies. 

When she knows his death is imminent, they move from their dark lonely house so far from town no one could hear a scream. We welcome my grandmother to the center of our dusty town. And perhaps we even welcome even my grandfather’s death, his alcoholism and rage an unspoken secret in our family.

After her husband’s death, my grandmother plants bright roses along the border of her new home, bursts of pink and orange, havens for the insects. She plants hollyhocks towering brightly over her walkway like little suns. She plants smiling daisies and fragrant petunias, riotous color all around. She even welcomes wildness inside, wallpapering her kitchen in yellow stripes and bouquets, blue buds and peach, cream and mauve. 

I love to visit, to listen to the sound of birds in her backyard birdbath, my grandmother whistling too, free now to fly wherever she wants. I love feeling safe enough to get lost in what she has cultivated. I love to wander the meandering garden paths unafraid.

I spend long afternoons and some evenings with my grandmother, who people believe is lonely, but who I see as content. We eat sweets and go for walks, talk for hours on her porch and collect snapdragons to place like painted nails on the tips of each of our outstretched fingers. I am older now and the snapdragons no longer frighten me—I know to prepare. I know to expect the bite. 

Sometimes I spend the night, and we watch all the movies I am not allowed to watch at home—vampires and monsters, dinosaurs running wild through the jungle.

“There’s no reason to be afraid,” grandmother says when I close my eyes. “Nothing here will hurt you.”

~

One morning I wake to find my mother sitting on the edge of my bed.

“I have something to tell you,” she says, and I worry because this is what she said when grandfather died and when my cat was run over by the neighbor’s car. “There was an accident last night.”

She mentions my aunt’s husband, the former soldier who bosses me around and hugs me too long and too tight, corrects me even when he is wrong, shows everyone his army tattoos of religious crosses so clumsily drawn they look like x marks the spot or the dead eyes in cartoons. I wonder how there has been an accident when he is always bragging about how good he is at racing vehicles, about his career driving tanks, even his military retirement spent building and driving model cars, laughing when he crashes them at my feet and I scream and try to run away, sometimes falling to my hands and knees. 

But my uncle is fine. I get ready for middle school while my mother explains. My uncle drove to his ex-wife’s house and got in a fight with her like he does all the time, recounting their screaming matches with bitter detail over the dinner table, calling her a crazy bitch while spittle forms around his mouth. My mother explains that they fought about custody and child support and then—somehow—my uncle ran up and over her flower beds and her body with his pickup truck. 

I do not understand why everyone is so calm. I do not understand why everyone is defending my uncle, a man who has frightened me since before I could speak. It seems there are many excuses for why a man might run over a woman, but none for when I forget to brush my teeth or when I hide things under my bed.

While we wait for my uncle to go to trial, to go to jail, we visit my aunt. The adults sit inside rationalizing while I retreat outside to the garden. The sun is unrelenting and my skin burns and later peels like a lizard’s, but I refuse to go inside. The bulbs stand tall, perfuming the dry air. I do what I am taught—I pull weeds from flowers, tossing them away even though I know they will rise again.

~

In high school I drive many miles through dusty backroads that twist like vines. I relish this safety and solitude, just me and the rural roads.

I am paid to housesit for my former middle school principal and his family. There’s not much to do—simply water the garden full of peas and tomatoes, water the few flowering things dotted in pots around the vegetables. I do not know why I am paid so much, but perhaps it is because my principal likes me, used to rest his heavy hands on my shy shoulders and congratulate me for earning the highest marks in school, used to call me to his office when I should be in class to come up with some project to set me apart from the rest, used to say “God made you special” because he was loud about his private Christianity even though ours was a public school.

“What a hunk,” my mother said with all the other mothers about his charm, his dimples, the charisma he used to avoid conflict. He never seemed stressed like his wife, also a teacher, who was thin-lipped and tense like so many women who worked at my school, like so many women I knew. How could she be unhappy with a husband like that? 

For many days, then for many years, I drive the long way out to their house to water plants. I tend to the garden while the family is away, pulling suckers that threaten the tomatoes. One summer there is a tomato worm infestation. The creatures are large and segmented, antennaed and prehistoric as dinosaurs. I stare into their dark eyes and wonder what they have seen. I cannot bring myself to squish them like I have been instructed. I cannot hurt something so helpless. Instead, I gather the worms in a box full of tomato cuttings and bring them home, where I hope they will sprout wings and transform enough to fly away. But they do not. They die despite my desperation. 

Time passes, another summer, another year. I help cater the wedding for his daughter, a girl who marries so young he weeps and weeps that her new husband is taking away his little girl. I wave at his wife in the grocery store, suddenly aware of how much time has passed because I am not a girl anymore and she is so very small now.

One day, when I am in college, I read the news. My old principal has run off with one of his middle school students. She was in the Christian youth group he ministered. She will have his baby. He is my father’s age and has groomed this child for many years. She is not the first. And even though my rural school was small, barely more than 60 students in my graduating class, this is not the first teacher to violate a student. In middle school, a teacher left suddenly after parent complaints. In the locker room, girls warned each other to avoid another teacher who liked to pick us up and dance us around the playground with his hands on our waists. In high school, I avoided a teacher who liked to remind me how close we were in age, who invited me to his house. In secret, my friend dated the middle school band teacher, though now that I am an adult, I realize, this was not a secret at all, because on overnight trips away to perform and compete, everyone knew she stayed in his room alone.

~

The halls of the natural history museum are empty except for me and the fossils. The bronzed bones of dinosaurs tower overhead, casting shadows in the florescent lights. Under glass, ancient ferns are preserved forever, looking as if they are still alive. 

 After college, I felt that way, trapped behind museum glass, as if a fossil in amber, desperate to run as the tar rose all around, affixing me to my death. Sexual violence was both inevitability and shock—there was a man who broke into my apartment one night and stalked me for months after, but also the ways friends, casual acquaintances, and even lovers abused consent with unapologetic nonchalance. I blamed myself, like so many women. Perhaps I had not learned well enough how little it takes for a dragon to snap.

Worse was the slow accumulation of brutalities against girls and women around me. Their histories of physical and sexual abuse, the ways they daily endured the admonishment and scorn of men who claimed to love them. I learned, too, about the men in my family and their records of abuse towards women and children. Some artifacts were a brutal reckoning—family members who assaulted women and children and spoke openly of it, family members who beat women and children in front of others. And some were a slow extinction of the men I loved—I watched my father harass his female boss, a woman he couldn’t comprehend capable of running a construction firm full of men, and once, drunk, he told the story of punching an old girlfriend because it was the only way to calm her down. 

In museums, we construct narratives from the specimens we find. History is a careful curation we witness only through the lens of the present, artifacts of value because everything has changed, because everything is dead. When I think back to my childhood fascination with dinosaurs, I understand it as an obsession with survival. These were creatures so large and with such tough skin that nothing could hurt them. These were creatures that wore scars on their hides, teeth and claws slashing their victory. 

And I believe I loved dinosaurs because millions of years after their disappearance, they were still important enough to be remembered, were still something to be missed. They did not disappear easily, like the sobs of the women I loved under bathroom doors, or my grandmother to her garden gate to look over the fence as if to escape, or my aunt to another state after her husband went to prison, though everyone said she was a bad wife for abandoning him, or the many girls and women I loved sinking beneath the weight of their despair, who, after their abuse, did not live fully or at all, sometimes frozen as if fossils in real life.

I did not want to be the flowers my family grew for solace, the ones men brought home sometimes to say sorry. I did not want to grow so thorny I could not bloom. I did not want to be a bulb hiding so dark and lonely I burst. I wanted to be a dinosaur so wild I might save my own life.

I am gathering artifacts to make sense of men and memory. I am trying to tend to a garden gone barren from neglect. But walking through museum halls, I do not know what is more ferocious—the tyrannosaurus rex so frustrated by his inability to reach small arms out to grasp what he wanted that he resorted to ravaging, or the tender fern that has survived for millions of years, that outlives the dinosaurs who used to crush it easily underfoot. I remember the Edens of my childhood, the gardens women made despite the ways men sought to expel them. What tender audacity. What fierce hope. What boasts survival more than an oasis clotting a desert?

At the end of the hall, I hear a scream. I walk past the skeletons of creatures I admired as a child, with teeth as big as a man, with plastic eyes affixed to my flesh. Behind them are bright replicas of the prehistoric jungles where they once lived, strong trees and bold flowers, life vibrating all around. 

As I turn the corner into a case of taxidermy animals, I spy a young boy aiming a fake gun with his fingers. His sister cowers behind her hands. He wears a camouflage shirt. She wears a daisy sundress.

“Please,” she begs. “Don’t hurt me.”

“This is the game,” he says simply. “I’m just playing.”

In the reflection of the display case, I watch him aim again as she curls in on herself like a wilting flower.