Exchange Student
This piece was originally published in the Brown Jug in 2015
We still hadn’t found a subletter by the beginning of the semester and because most of us would rather that room be filled, we brought in Josie’s recently thawed Paleolithic man to live with us. He had been found in Denmark, so we knew there would be some cultural differences to deal with.
He was a funny guy, the Paleolithic man. Hairy, curious, like a monkey. They are close to monkeys, the Paleolithics, but he had a wide-eyed optimism about the day ahead that I’ve never seen in any monkey.
He would get restless sometimes, and we speculated that he wanted to hunt. We thought grocery shopping might have the same effect, so we took him to Stop & Shop, where he spent an hour stalking the aisles with a long wooden spear, in particular the refrigerated section with the meat.
One day, my roommate told me NatGeo was showing a documentary on the Paleolithic era, so we livestreamed it for the Paleolithic man. He missed the first half because he was at the DMV, but when he got back he was very moved.
The documentary followed one character: a Paleolithic woman named “Eve,” through the everyday life and tribulations of the Ice Age. The Paleolithic man said he knew Eve and that even though she had some garbage friends in the tribe, she was really down to earth. He hoped she was doing well. Unfortunately, toward the end of the show she and a couple others got crushed by a falling rock, and the Paleolithic man got really down. He stopped talking for the rest of the night. It was a sad evening for all of us.
He couldn’t handle certain noises. The heater made him think of saber-toothed tigers, which would make him really freak out. Also, he associated my iPhone alarm with having to wake up early in the morning because he had the same one.
He would most often walk around half naked, with his torso exposed, and we were jealous of his body. He was really cut, and he looked like he exercised, but all we ever saw him eat was junk food, so we thought maybe soon he’d get really fat. None of us had ever seen a fat Paleolithic man. We couldn’t even imagine what that would look like, and we were excited to find out.
When the semester was up, the Paleolithic man had to leave. He said he’d be going back to Denmark to get frozen, and that maybe, someday in the future, he’d thaw again and come back stateside. We told him we were all going to miss him, and he gave us a bunch of great hunting and pagan worship sites to visit if we were ever in Denmark.
After he left, we were cleaning his room before winter break, and we found a paper he had written for a sociology class. There, in very elemental English, he wrote about the great time he’d had with us in America. The paper had a big red “D” written at the top. The teacher was not happy, although she did like how he connected it to Marx. We were proud of him. We hoped wherever fate took the Paleolithic man next that the Mother Goddess would be watching over him, keeping him safe, and checking his mailbox every once in a while to clear out the spam.















