A THING by ZACHARY KOCANDA
Our Arguments Versus the Tully Monster
Invertebrate, vertebrate. Scientists can’t make up their goddamn minds. I complete a literature review for the first time in a decade. “The ‘Tully monster’ is a vertebrate,” I am told in a 2016 paper by McCoy and team. There’s another paper that year in agreement called “Getting the measure of a monster,” a title I will later steal for a poem. “The eyes of Tullimonstrum reveal a vertebrate affinity” concurs yet a third paper that year from a third team. Of course, the next year, a different paper reports: “The ‘Tully monster’ is not a vertebrate.” And there’s a second pro-invertebrate paper two years later—the experiment even used a laser—titled “Synchrotron X-ray absorption spectroscopy of melanosomes in vertebrates and cephalopods: Implications for the affinity of Tullimonstrum.” I read the abstract and don’t know what any of the words mean. What is a fish? And then a new McCoy paper in 2020 gives a point to the vertebrate team, this one too featuring a laser. Finally, there’s a paper from last year crying invertebrate that “casts doubt on its presumed vertebrate affinities.”
We go back and forth like this too for what feels like three hundred million years, fights echoing from the Pennsylvanian period.
You see the Tully monster on the side of a U-Haul. I see it in the mirror—this thing found only in Illinois, a slow swimmer with a gumbylike body and debatable spine.
I know we can solve this together.
Touch my back and tell me what you feel.
Zachary Kocanda (he/him) has had recent writing in Joyland, Oyez Review, and Another Chicago Magazine, among others. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. More at zacharykocanda.com.