Behold the Struthiomimus.
The ostrich mimic, but it does a poor job of it – not only is it over ten feet long, even in this immature state, but it’s got a great big tail and its eyes aren’t fixed in their sockets and it lives millions and millions of years ago so it can’t mimic the thing it precedes. Its feet are fast and its movements are darting and its toothless keratin-sheathed bony beak is opened just wide enough for it to breath a tiny bit harder, because it’s been running for a while, picking its way through dense thickets in the highlands as it descends through growing forests and fallen trees.
Its name is Billy.
***
Behold Billy.
He looks both ways at the intersection, just like his mother told him to. It’s a busy time of day down in the valley where the river runs wide, and the traffic is thick and plodding. Great big thunderingly slow hadrosaurs are on the move from hither to thither; heavy-skulled and pointy-browed ceratopsians are ambling down for their noon drinks. They’re swapping filthy stories as they go, telling the tall tale about the titanosaur that sat on a cycad.
Billy tries to pay them no mind. He’s on a mission. His mother told him he needed to do something important for her today, and he’s a good boy.
***
Behold the good boy.
He’s headed downtown, where the new monkey puzzle trees have grown in fast and furious and thunderous, towering up and up. His mother complains about them, says they’re a gentrifying blight on the landscape, but Billy isn’t sure whether or not she’s talking about something real or just griping, like when she bitches that mammals are taking all the jobs that used to go to good honest saurs, which his father has told him is total bullshit and not to be listened to. She’s not that bad on most days though, now that the news is off the air. Real tragic what happened to that anchorman though, but silver linings and it’s an ill wind that blows good for nobody and so on and so forth and etc and the like.
Billy stops for a drink. His mother gave him money for that, it’s okay. He sips from a cheap little rivulet, but it’s strongly sweet and just what he wanted. He watches a couple of cute coelurosaurs sipping from the other side of the brook, wishes he knew what the hell you were meant to do in circumstances like this, and shakes it off. He has an errand.
***
Behold the errand.
The corner volcano lurches into view, surrounded by pale plastic palm trees. Billy scurries inside past the obese caveman at the entrance, cheap faux-leopardprint loincloth adorned with his last meal – and the meal before that, and the meal before that, and so on and so on.
“No browsin’” he belches out, scratching himself somewhere unthinkable, unimaginable, and unspeakable.
Billy is not here to browse. Billy is here for a purpose. He scurries past the shelves of pet rocks, the bins of home hardware rocks, the boxes of jelly rocks (takes effort, that one – oh, he’s loved those ever since he hatched), and finally he stands at the rock racks.
His mother wants a rock magazine about home and shale. Billy is looking for it very honestly, of course he is, but his eyes wander and bobble trying to find it, and what should they rest upon – quite accidentally! – but the hard rock section.
Wow.
He’s never seen a tail quite that thick before.
There is a distant belch and Billy is overcome with impossible and inescapable shame at the mere idea of anyone knowing he glanced at that part of the rock rack, let alone thought about it. He hunts frantically, digs through the back issues, and there it is: home and shale’s top ten picks of the burgess.
Those long slender hands are good for grabbing; it’s snatched up and dragged to the front of the store before you can say ‘non-pronating forelimbs.’
“Thirteen pebbles,” says the caveman, exploring his nose with the hairiest of his fingers.
Billy puts down what his mother gave him.
“That’s ten,” says the caveman. And sonuva b-word he’s right; mom must have slipped Billy two fives instead of a ten and a five. “Gimme three.”
“I don’t have it,” says Billy. And he doesn’t; he’s a good boy, but now and then he feels temptation – the dark urge to blow his money on candy. So he left it at home. All he’s got is ten pebbles from his mother.
“Tough luck,” says the caveman. “Beat it.”
***
Behold the beating of it.
Billy walks home slow, dejected, one slow foot at a time, uphill into the suburbs where the homeless are forbidden and the fern-coated lawns are perfect and hideous. The concrete is hot beneath his sneakers; it’s a boiling day in Laurasia and even the rain that starts falling feels pre-fried before it hits the ground, hissing away into nothing as soon as it listlessly spatters against the old red sandstone road.
It’s about then that he remembers that he forgot to take his pebbles back from the caveman.
“Fuck!” says Billy, for the first time without premeditation. It feels hot and spicy in his beak, and he looks around guiltily, sure someone is about to tell him not to do that. But there’s nobody around except for an elderly tyrannosaur across the road, dozing at the bus stop, and it clearly is going to take a lot more than some spontaneous profanity to get them to move or give much of a shit about anything ever again. He wonders if they’re dead.
Billy sort of wonders if it’d be better to be dead or to have to explain to his mom that he doesn’t have her home and shale magazine. This makes him feel shame, for what seems like the hundredth time that day. It’s almost as hot as the air, and he’s thirsty again. Oh no.
Oh no. Oh no no no no no no no he stopped for a drink! How much did it cost? Did it cost three pebbles?
He thinks it costed three pebbles.
“FUCK!” yells Billy, loud enough to wake up the elderly tyrannosaurus with a snort and loud enough that he can’t even be embarrassed about it. “Fuck!” He screwed up! He had a drink and he ruined everything! His mother’s going to be furious with him! “Fuck.” He should’ve just given up and bought more garbage and claimed he dropped the magazine in the river. “Fuck…” now the caveman has the rest of the money and he’ll deny it if Billy goes back and all he has to show for it, all his mother has to show for it, is a sort of tepid drink in Billy’s stomach and a lot of regret.
***
Behold the regret.
It’s scorched into the sandstone and into Billy’s soul as he trudges up the steps to his house, a little split-level slab that gets paid for by alimony and desperation. His palms would be sweaty if he could sweat.
There’s movement from inside the curtains. His mother is awake. Probably waiting for her magazine.
Fuck, thinks Billy, because this close to home he sure as hell isn’t going to say it aloud. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fucklestein fuck fuck fuckosaurus rex fuck me fuck you fuck everything.
He wishes the ground would rise up and swallow him. He wishes the seas would rush in and wash him away. He wishes the sky would fall down and pop him out of existence, and it catches him by the most surprise anyone’s ever had when it does just that.
It’s a big bright flash to the south.
“Woah,” he says, as the shockwave ripples closer, evaporating trees and soil and dinosaurs and cavemen and buildings and knocking over the Bronto-Burger down the street and kicking its sign towards him at one thousand miles an hour, the cheerful stupid grin of Buddy Bronto the last thing he knows he will ever see.
Behold: a wish granted.