I was walking down the Meuse river when I saw it on the day that everyone saw it. Just doddling along like a mobilized bobbing-bird when a fin flickering in the water caught my eye and a gust of fishy breath netted it.
There it was, dancing in the current and grinning like a fiend: a crocodile’s head on a snake’s body with a shark’s fin and tail; Mosasaurus, as big as a big bus and a lot livelier. Which was funny because I thought they were all meant to be dead. It made a rude noise at me and the world in general, swallowed a fish, and then it was gone.
I checked the internet, but nothing came up until I was home. It had come out of a quarry, like its fossilized predecessors, but wetter and wrigglier and with a thirst for the sea. And now it was gone, and we didn’t have anything but questions.
Few worries, though. After all, it was just one mosasaur.
I was watching television, but it was my father’s idea, so don’t blame me. There were commercials, and advertisements, and serious people in serious outfits wearing serious expressions telling us about serious things.
The mosasaurs, they informed us, were being troublesome. They were eating seals and dolphins and sharks, and they were making fun of killer whales. They were insouciant to our maritime laws, they mocked the physical capabilities of our fishermen at home and abroad.
Damn lizards, my father said.
Actually, the television told him, it’s also been argued that they are distant relatives of snakes. He thought about this and considered it acceptable.
And we were annoyed, but not much more. After all, it was just a few mosasaurs.
I was at work, brewing coffee, serving coffee, cleaning the building, running the floor, placating the customers, and restocking from the backroom, when a woman walked up to me brandishing a paper.
The mosasaurs, she told me, gesturing with violent fingers, were a real concern. They were on land now, wandering the streets and the world alike, ignoring the traffic and flouting our criminal codes. This sauciness would not be tolerated, I was informed. It was all the fault of young people that this had happened, with their sloth and apathy and immoral ways.
I asked her if she wanted anything and she threw the paper at me and walked away. I read some of it on the way to the recycling bins – nothing much new – and as I was tossing it inside, struggling with the big metal bin, something rattled the garbage dumpster next to me. I whacked it with my knuckles, thud thud thud, get out you damned racoon, and was very surprised when a mosasaur hoisted it off the ground, eyes twinkling, and swallowed it.
Then it left, chuckling, and I had a hell of a time explaining it to management. They weren’t pleased. After all, there weren’t meant to be mosasaurs.
The mosasaurs, my friend informed me, as we sat in my apartment looking at the internet and the world, which were the same, were no laughing matter. He was an environmental biology major and was looking tense. Niches, he said, it’s all down to niches. The mosasaurs were taking ours now. Already they outfished us, already they had taken all our favorite Olympic sports, already they had drastically altered our legal systems by dint of condescension and overwhelming mass. Now there were mosasaurs defoliating tropical rainforests; mosasaurs commandeering burger franchises; mosasaurs running for high office; mosasaurs standing on the street corners and beginning for change. And everywhere a mosasaur did it, a human wasn’t.
They’ve done this once before, my friend muttered, darkly. Ask a plesiosaur. Go on, ask one.
But we couldn’t find one anywhere. After all, they were gone. Instead, we had mosasaurs.
The mosasaurs, the angry man standing outside what used to be my coffee shop told me, were an allegory.
I told him I thought they were related to lizards, or maybe snakes.
He told me to shut up. It’s plain as day, he said. Look at them; they come out of nowhere, they take our jobs, they infiltrate our society, they don’t live by our rules or values. The mosasaurs are an allegory for illegal immigrants! You know, he said. THOSE people.
There was a deep, gurgling, watery chortle. A passing mosasaur had overheard us. You silly little ape, it said, but lovingly. There are no more illegal immigrants. We replaced your international laws last month, because they were stupid and shoddy. Then we replaced your legal system, because it was slow and weak. And your governments were replaced yesterday, for being hesitant, inbred, and incestuous.
So now all immigration is legal? I asked.
No, said the mosasaur, but it’s irrelevant, because we replaced your illegal immigrants for being insufficiently voracious. You can be allegories if you like, but we’re more practical than that, and we’re too busy being us. It smiled at us, ate the angry man, and moved onwards, into the future.
After all, the future was mosasaurs.
The mosasaurs, I thought to myself, were seriously out of hand.
I had no job. This was because mosasaurs had taken all the jobs and made them into something better. I had no food; this was because all existing groceries and agricultural practices and modes of consumption had been made obsolete by mosasaurs. I also had nowhere to stay, because mosasaurs had cornered the housing market, then declared it outdated and gotten rid of it, plus the houses. And the air quality was worse, because the mosasaurs had out-polluted us. But they were fixing that because they were better at renewable energy and implementing carbon caps.
I wanted to complain to somebody, but all my friends and family were now mosasaurs who’d out-competed them, and they were sympathetic – no, better than sympathetic, they were practical and emotionally supportive while providing an environment conducive to self-growth and independence – but ultimately would do nothing but politely point out all the ways I was being stubborn and stupid. And they’d be right.
After all, they were mosasaurs.
One day I wandered into civilization, looking for food (it was hard, because civilization was now also obsolete) and was told I was the last human on Earth.
It hadn’t seemed to take very long, I said. These things often don’t, they said.
I looked around me, and I didn’t recognize anything. Cities, buildings, material culture, and society were now ecological deadends, and had been replaced by things I had no words for. I asked the mosasaurs what their names were and they told me that words were now obsolete, too. Language in general had been out-competed.
You know, I told them, we had a pretty good thing going here. The most adaptable and versatile of all vertebrates, living in almost every environment. The great tool-user, the crafter of the complex society, the thinker of abstract thoughts and makers of imagined worlds.
Yeah, said the mosasaurs. We know. But you weren’t actually very good at any of it.
So, do I go in a zoo now?
Zoos are obsolete, we’ve got a better plan.
Are you going to save my DNA in a bottle somewhere?
All of those things are outmoded. DNA. Bottles. Somewheres. We’ve got a better plan.
And I couldn’t do much more than nod and agree with that, as they took me down the river to the quarry, where they’d already poked open a little hole in the heart of the rock for me, in the shale and the sediment and soft dry dust.
After all, it had worked for mosasaurs.