Stories

Max decided to document and illustrate his collection. The professor helped identify and date each item, which Max illustrated and described on two facing pages, comprising a volume that grew to over six hundred pages. Max discovered the joy of authorship, of creating something meaningful out of nothing— Well, not nothing. Each artifact existed in his library, each once belonged to a living creature, and each creature told a story about a place and time on our planet. Each always had many things to teach. In swamps and deserts, oceans and mountains, each creature found a way to reproduce, adapt, and thrive. But the end of their stories hadn’t yet been told. Max wasn’t giving them a new life. Max was only grabbing a few pages of their story and sharing it with others. Max wasn’t doing them a favor; they were giving Max a priceless gift.