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my apatosaurs? Where
are
they?”
    Mowed down, pulverized, flung into space.
    â€œThere, there, darling,” said Polly. “There, there.”
    â€œI want them back.”
    â€œThere, there,” said Polly.
    â€œI miss them.”
    â€œThere, there.”
    â€œMake them come back.”
    Â 
    The night Asa returned from camp, Borealis and his buddy Logos dropped by, just in time for a slice of Garber Farm’s famous raspberry pie. Borealis looked sheepish and fretful. “My friend has something to tell you,” he said. “A kind of proposal.”
    Having consumed an entire jar of Beech-Nut strained sweet potatoes and two bottles of Similac, the baby was in bed for the night. Her flutelike snores wafted into the kitchen as Polly and Asa served our guests.
    Logos sat down, resting his spindly hands on the red-and-white checkerboard oilcloth as if trying to levitate the table. “Ben, Polly, I’ll begin by saying I’m not a religious man. Not the sort of man who’s inclined to believe in God. But . . .”
    â€œYes?” said Polly, raising her eyebrows in a frank display of mistrust.
    â€œBut I can’t shake my conviction that your Zenobia has been . . . well,
sent
. I feel that Providence has deposited her in our laps.”
    â€œShe was deposited in
my
lap,” Polly corrected him. “My lap and Ben’s.”
    â€œI think it was the progesterone suppositories,” I said.
    â€œDid you ever hear how, in the old days, coal miners used to take canaries down into the shaft with them?” asked Logos, forking a gluey clump of raspberries into his mouth. “When the canary started squawking, or stopped singing, or fell to the bottom of the cage and died, the men knew poison gases were leaking into the mine.” The health commissioner devoured his pie slice in a half-dozen bites. “Well, Ben and Polly, it seems to me that your Zenobia is like that. It seems to me God has given us a canary.”
    â€œShe’s a biosphere,” said Asa.
    Without asking, Logos slashed into the remaining pie, excising a fresh piece. “I’ve been on the horn to Washington all week, and I must say the news is very, very good. Ready, Ben—ready, Polly?” The commissioner cast a twinkling eye on our boy. “Ready, son? Get this.” He gestured as if fanning open a stack of money. “The Department of the Interior is prepared to pay you three hundred thousand dollars—that’s three hundred thousand, cash—for Zenobia.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” I asked.
    â€œI’m talking about buying that little canary of yours for three hundred thousand bucks.”
    â€œBuying her?”
said my wife, inflating. Polly the puff adder, Polly the randy tree frog.
    â€œShe’s the environmental simulacrum we’ve always wanted,” said Logos. “With Zenobia, we can convincingly model the long-term effects of fluorocarbons, nitrous oxide, mercury, methane, chlorine, and lead. For the first time, we can study the impact of deforestation and ozone depletion without ever leaving the lab.”
    Polly and I stared at each other, making vows with our eyes. We were patriotic Americans, my wife and me, but nobody was going to deplete our baby’s ozone, not even the President of the United States himself.
    â€œLook at it this way,” said Borealis; he gripped his coffee mug with one hand, tugged anxiously at the kitchen curtains with the other. “If scientists can finally offer an irrefutable scenario of ecological collapse, then the world’s governments may really start listening, and Asa here will get to grow up on a safer, cleaner planet. Everybody benefits.”
    â€œZenobia doesn’t benefit,” said Polly.
    Borealis slurped coffee. “Yes, but there’s a greater good here, right, folks?”
    â€œShe’s just a
globe
, for Christ’s sake,” said