“Can I have the eggs?” Tyrrel asked his mother.
She looked up at him from her computer; distracted in that way that meant she was very very busy but could wait for just a second. “What for?”
“Science fair project. I want to try and hatch them.”
His mother nodded. “Sure. They’re almost expired anyways. Just be careful not to break any.” The second over, she turned her eyes and mind away and inwards and Tyrrel was on his own again.
This would have been perfectly fine in most respects at most times. She trusted him, and he understood that, and she loved that. She would have approved to see the little nest he made from the egg carton and a few old dishrags – not the newer, nicer ones that were still in use. She would have been happy to see the place he chose to incubate the clutch – off the floor, in the shed, in an emptied and decluttered drawer that the cat couldn’t get at and where smells couldn’t reach the house if things went wrong. And she would have been proud to see the carefully-large-printed label he affixed to the drawer itself: CAUTION: EGG PROJECT INSIDE.
She might, however, have cautioned him against using his grandmother’s old electric blanket as a warming pad. Even if he was very very careful about reading the instructions and following the safety directions.
***
“They hatched!” Tyrrel told his mother at great speed and greater volume at a very very small hour of the morning.
“What?” she asked, with the sort of articulateness at that hour that only raising children can grant you.
“The eggs!”
“Really?”
“Yes! And they’re precocial!”
“Yes yes very precious.”
“Precocial! And they’re HUNGRY. Can I-”
“You can feed them,” said his mother. And he left and she slept and there was no more consequence from that until breakfast, when she found what she couldn’t find.
“Tyrrel? Have you seen the bacon anywhere?”
“I fed it to the chicks, yousaidicould” said Tyrrel with the velocity and sincerity of a lawyer or any other eight-year-old.
“You fed it to them? They could get sick!”
“It was what they wanted!” he protested. “And they aren’t sick! They’re fine! And they’re still hungry; can we get more bacon?”
“Birdseed,” she said firmly. “Take the bag and come with me and I’ll show you how to feed them.”
Tyrrel’s protests were only somewhat muted by seven kilograms of birdseed, and they continued all the way to the shed.
“They don’t like it!”
“They need more bacon!”
“They liked the bacon!”
“This is too heavy!”
“Why aren’t you listening?”
Tyrrel’s mother brushed them away like an elephant walking through a cobweb, found the drawer, approved of the labelling, opened it, and saw the egg clutch.
The egg clutch saw her, at the top of its lungs.
“Tyrrel,” she said. “These are dinosaurs.”
“Birds are dinosaurs!”
“All birds are dinosaurs,” she said, “but not all dinosaurs are birds. And these aren’t birds. They have teeth.”
“Geese have teeth!”
“That’s cartilage. These are teeth. And they have arms, not wings, and they have little hands, and those little hands have little claws. Tyrrel, you are raising non-avian dinosaurs in the shed for a science project.”
“Okay,” said Tyrrel, giving up. “But I’ll take good care of them!”
“Only until the science fair,” she said firmly. “After that, they’re going to the museum – no, the zoo. You can’t raise…one, two, three four five, six….six carnivorous dinosaurs in the shed. We don’t know how big they’ll get, or what they’ll end up eating.”
“They want more bacon.”
“Chicken,” she said. “We’re going to feed them some chicken breast. Not too fatty. And we’ll probably need some calcium powder.”
“But they liked bacon!”
“They’re hungry, they’ll like anything. Hatching is hard work. And you’re using tongs to feed them from now on.”
“I was careful.”
“This is even more careful. I want you to grow up with as many fingers as you can. And we’ll need to move them into a bigger pen. What are you using to keep them warm?”
“An electric blanket,” said Tyrrel, his enthusiasm dimming somewhat under the onslaught of realistic concerns and their solutions.
“What KIND of electric blanket?”
“…grandma’s electric blanket.”
“Well,” said his mother, with that particular sort of accent on the word that meant more than any curse, “that certainly explains everything. No dessert for a week and no arguing – you know better than to touch any of your grandma’s things. Now go get me the tongs and let’s get it out of there right now before anything else happens. We’re lucky they didn’t hatch with six legs.”
***
The hatchlings outgrew the drawer and the first chickenwire enclosure and – subsequently – the shed itself, one after another. By the time they were sleeping outside their plumage had grown thicker and sleeker, trapping more heat – but even so Tyrrel’s mother prompted him to leave them wood shavings, blankets, boxes, windbreaks. They enjoyed all of them and slept curled into feathery heaps all night and much of the day. Mealtimes brought them wide awake, and making sure everyone got enough to eat was an act of profoundly confusing tong-work. This would be followed by a midafternoon meal coma, broken by fits of spectacularly high-speed recreational squabbling, then demands for more food.
“I thought I’d have to wait longer to be a grandmother,” Tyrrel’s mother mused as he dragged himself indoors nursing a headache from loud and insistent little voices and trying to keep six lightning-quick scuttlers. “And I guess I’ll still have to. But this is a good preview of it.”
“They’re so NOISY,” groaned Tyrrel.
“You were louder. Are louder.”
He glared at her, defeated and refusing to acknowledge it without one last push. “But there’s SIX of them!”
“Yeah, and they’re a lot less useless than you were – all you have to do is chop some chicken and give it over, then use the poop-scooper. We had to feed you, burp you, change you…”
“That’s not my fault! They’re just precocial.”
“Precarious my left foot; they’re THRIVING at the top of their lungs. If you want to survive it? Try earplugs. I’ve got some in the outside pocket of my guitar case.”
Tyrrel got the earplugs.
Tyrrel also got grandma’s electric blanket back from the bottom of the drawer, because he noticed the hatchlings slept better on it. And it wasn’t like he was doing anything wrong, because he only kept it in there for them overnight and took it out again before anything else happened, which was all his mother had asked for, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
***
Baking soda volcanoes. Clay-and-stick model beaver dams on pondwater- blue construction paper. Solar system mobiles. And a little pen filled with a half-dozen clicking, hopping, feathered maniacs.
Tyrrel was feeling pretty good about his chances, not least because two of the judges had been parked by his exhibit for the last ten minutes. Even if they weren’t very good at listening to him.
“My, aren’t they bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!” observed the judge with glasses a little too loudly. His sweaty pale pink hands kept twitching back and forth, like he was perpetually stopping himself from scooping the hatchlings up. “Are you sure they’re babies? Look at them jump!”
“They’re babies,” said Tyrrel with the slight hesitance coming from telling a slight lie, “they’re just precocial.” Probably. Toddlers were babies, right?
“I certainly HOPE you’re taking precautions; if they got out I reckon we’d all be lunchmeat. Look at the fangs on the little fellas!”
“I feed them with tongs.” Long tongs. They’d REALLY started growing faster since he’d given them more use of the electric blanket. Gone was the baby fuzz, gone was the sleepiness; present was the leaping and snapping and relentless interrogation of everything for food at all times.
“Wonderful, wonderful. Don’t you think that’s wonderful, Jules?”
The judge without glasses was busy taking more pictures on his phone.
“I said don’t you think that’s wonderful, Jules? I said don’t you think that’s wonderful, J-”
“Yes,” said the judge without glasses. He took six more pictures and one video and walked off.
“I THOUGHT so,” said the judge with glasses with terrible satisfaction. His hands twitched violently one last time as he swooped away after his colleague.
Something else swooped after him. And that was when Tyrrel realized, with an awful slowness that paralyzed him from the scalp down, body and soul, that not having actual wings didn’t mean you couldn’t use your little feathery arms to combine the best features of leaping and fluttering and clambering.
He also realized – several minutes later than he should’ve – that the sweaty pale pink hands of the judge with glasses looked just a little like raw chicken.
And finally at the moment of impact, he realized that he wished he had his earplugs in.
***
It was decided that it wasn’t the judge with glasses’ fault because he had no idea that he looked like delicious raw chicken.
It was decided that it wasn’t Tyrrel’s fault because the judge with glasses flailing around had been what knocked over the displays and, subsequently, the pen.
It was also decided that it wasn’t the school’s fault because there was no strict legal requirement to lock all entrances and exits during a science fair.
And finally it wasn’t the egg company’s fault because they insisted they only raised perfectly ordinary domestic egg-laying chickens and they didn’t know anything about any of this.
Tyrrel’s mother, however, blamed his grandmother.
“I can’t believe it’s been twenty years and we’re still finding garbage she messed with,” she grumbled as she locked the electric blanket away inside the family safe, next to the kettle, the lamp, the glasses, the scarf, the pen, and six extremely large and devastatingly-scribbled notebooks. “You tell me the moment you find anything of hers and don’t mess with it, alright? We got off lucky this time.”
“But I didn’t win the science fair,” complained Tyrrel.
“No, but the judge didn’t lose his fingers. Call it even. And no dessert for the rest of the month.”
“But nobody got hurt!”
“So far. We don’t know how big those little guys will get.”
***
They never did know in the end, because the hatchlings were never seen again. Tyrrel lived in hope nonetheless, a hope buoyed by an unexplained historic low in local deer populations that began several years later.
And that was the first and last time that any trouble came from Tyrrel at the elementary school science fair.
The great sabre-toothed bacon escape happened in grade nine.