ยป
My house filled up.
Scales, feathers, fur. Eyes, whiskers, ears. Roars, screeches. Birdsong and whalesong. But slowly, quietly, something else arrived. A few footsteps in a valley in Africa, preserved in ash, 3.6 million years ago. More fossilized prints on the shore of a lake in Kenya. A group of four or five adults. Different bands, species, and tribes: interbreeding, spreading out. Tools of chipped flint. Signs of a woolly mammoth hunt. The flute of a Neanderthal. The first cave paintings. Metallurgy. Libraries. Satellites. Code. After all this time, I met my creators.