Sometimes you come across a phrase that haunts you all day. A few words scraped from last night’s dream, maybe an odd line in the news. This morning I flipped open a half-empty notebook that I found under the bed and landed on a page that said “horseshoe crab death march” next to a doodle of an alien-looking creature’s tracks in the sand. The handwriting belongs to me, and I half-remember writing this on the steps of a museum in Texas five or six years ago. Houston, maybe Dallas. But I cannot recall why I felt compelled to write this down, let alone illustrate it. Who was that man?

So I’ve been chanting “horseshoe crab death march” in my head all day like a terrible mantra, and I’ve learned there’s a precise word for the footprints of a dying creature: a mortichnia, or “death march”.

One hundred days after the first case of coronavirus in New York City, the shops and streets are beginning to reopen. Protests continue across the nation. They shut down the interstate in Oregon.