Dinos
by Beth Spencer
Seven a.m. and they’re already clawing at the back door, their long, earnest heads slightly moist from exertion, their eyes imploring. Winnie gets their bowls from the pantry and pours kibble, scraping what’s left of last night’s burrito over the top and adding as garnish a chewable multivitamin. She has learned to be careful while serving. These days, now that they come up to her knees, she wears big leather utility gloves and speaks firmly—Back! Hold your horses!—while dropping their cratered dishes onto the porch. They lift them up with petite, thalidomide arms and upend the contents into cavernous, razor-toothed mouths. Breakfast is extinct within thirty seconds. Why have they come? She does not know. At first she thought they were lizards, but no lizard she ever saw outside a National Geographic could walk on two feet.
Zoom out. Here’s Winnie’s house, a small board-and-batten cottage next to Puma Slough, a dank stream clogged with shopping carts, old tires, and syringes left behind by the junkies who shoot up under the Janus St. Bridge. Zoom out farther and Winnie’s unincorporated neighborhood, Clappertown, takes on the appearance of a Scrabble board whose tiles have just endured an earthquake. Little boxy houses, some with bright tarps stretched over holes in the roofing, sit akimbo, their yards a chaos of cars that don’t run, rusty swing sets, weeds, and chickens. Not Winnie’s yard, though. Morning glory, trumpet vine, and thorny pyracantha cover the old picket fence. Without their entangled support it would have collapsed decades ago. Now it’s the invisible skeleton of a tall hedge. Twin camphor trees flank the brick walkway, a rogue ailanthus is taking over the backyard, and clay pots of coleus and begonia line up on her porch rail. If a satellite zeroed in on this place, all it would register is overgrowth.
What Winnie is not: an alcoholic, addicted to anything stronger than coffee and an occasional puff of marijuana. What Winnie is: educated, divorced, childless, a freelance editor. She’s checked out Tyrannosaurus rex on the net, just to make sure, and yes, that’s what these dinos are, only in miniature. At least so far. Really, they’re not so tyrannical, especially once they’ve been fed. Right now, for instance, they’ve stretched out in a patch of sun beyond the canopy of her trees. She watches five leathery bellies rise and fall and listens to their postprandial snoring, a cartoonish chorus of mild growls, small bleats, occasional faint whistling.
What worries Winnie is the rate at which they’ve grown—from the size of salamanders in early July to large dogs now in August. They had simply appeared one day as she sat on her back porch with her laptop, working. She looked up from the essay she was editing and there they were, five lizards arrayed before her, looking at her with what appeared to be great curiosity. Or was it hunger? She had been nibbling on crackers when they showed up, and threw them some. It was almost comical how fast the dinos devoured them.
“I’m starting to wonder how long I’ll be able to afford their food,” she says to her ex, Ross, when he makes his weekly call. With Ross, everything is penciled in, even conversations with a former wife she is quite sure he should not be wasting his time on.
“Well, turn in a report. Call the college, for god’s sake,” he says, certain she is making the whole thing up just to piss him off. He suspects it’s her way of hinting she could use the alimony she’d refused on principle, but he’s not about to offer it if she insists on continuing this charade.
“No, that wouldn’t solve anything. Anyone who knew they were here would probably want to kill them and right now they’re kind of nice to have around.” Winnie can picture Ross tilted back in his ergonomically correct office chair, the city spread out ten floors below him. She wonders if she still misses him. No, she thinks, she does not. She likes the rhythm of her life here in Clappertown, where morning breaks to a chorus of roosters or someone hammering something back together, and evening comes on to an accompaniment of kids called inside, a guitar strummed on a porch nearby, someone’s old hound crooning to the moon.
Ross threw a fit when she bought this place with what was left of her savings, but she didn’t want to remain in the house they’d shared. Let him have it. She’d always been slightly embarrassed by its monstrosity, not that it was any bigger than the others on their street.
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll kill you pretty soon?” Ross asks.
“Only if they don’t get breakfast in time.”
“Just round up a few loose chickens and three-legged dogs. That should satisfy them. Seriously, Win, I’m starting to worry about you. Your story would be a lot funnier if it had a point.”
“You think I’m lying? I wish!” Winnie takes the phone out to the porch, the better to watch the dinos starting to wake from their nap, a couple of them frisking around the camphor trees. She can’t help laughing, they’re so comical. Heavy in the haunch with huge tails that weigh them down, they waddle more than run, swiping at each other with their baby arms. She can tell by the way their big mouths hang open that they are truly enjoying themselves, taking pains not to wound each other with their long claws.
“Are you laughing at me?” Ross asks, as he’s asked at least five thousand times in the twenty years they’ve known each other. What she finds funny often involves some attempt on his part to be serious. Food, wine, architecture, vacation plans, even music—it occurs to her now that their differences of opinion have often come down to style. She has none. Rather, hers is ad hoc, last minute, thrown together, whereas his is the product of many years of expensive training. He has worked hard to be successful, and she has never fully appreciated it.
“Ross, you should see these guys. Listen, I better go run the hose for them. They’re going to get thirsty.”
“I’ve had enough of this, Win,” he says, clearing his throat. “You really need to grow up.”
“Maybe I should. You do make it sound awfully good.” Why she even takes his calls is a mystery, except that she’s curious how his story will turn out. Its ending will certainly be very different from what she’d imagined before the divorce. She clicks off the phone without waiting for the “okey-dokey” that signals he’s done with the conversation whether she is or not, and fills a galvanized washtub with water. Immediately, the dinos make a run for it. Dipping their bucket-sized heads in for quick noisy gulps, they remind her of wacky garden art. One of them, finished, comes over to lean against her leg affectionately, or so it seems. Her hand is stroking it before she even realizes what she’s doing.
They sleep under the porch. When night falls, often just about the time the neighborhood hound starts up, they troop off to the burrow they’ve dug between the pier posts. Winnie brings her laptop outside, curls up on the porch swing, and listens to them breathing below her as she answers e-mails, saving for last the ones from her family in Montana, all of whom are sure she’s made the biggest mistake of her life—and they don’t even know she’s raising dinos. She’s left them unanswered for two weeks.
Hey, howzit, sis? I’ve been thinking about you & Ross. Remember that time he got us box seats for the Giants? He’s not such a bad guy. He dumped the little chippie, right? Maybe you should take him back. Luv ya, Eddy
Winnie dear, I know you hate me to intrude in your personal life, but I just want to say that forgiveness is as good for the forgiver as it is for the forgivee. How else do you think your father and I have lasted this long? Think about it, OK? Love, Mom
Cuz! So glad you answered me. Yes, Ross is a bastard, but he’s also the guy you married. If you really want to make him suffer, just wait another few months before going home (let’s hope he’s been keeping up on the dishes and laundry, ha ha!). He’ll be ready to give you anything you want, like maybe a trip to Paris w/ your favorite cousin. xxooxx, Pammers
But making Ross suffer was never her aim. Winnie doesn’t like anything to suffer, including herself. Sappy as it sounds, all she wants for sure is the abolition of the death penalty and secret CIA torture programs, enough food for everyone, and the answer to why five dinosaurs have come into her life. Dinos haven’t reappeared anywhere else on earth, she’s sure, or it would have been all over TV and the net. And here’s another mystery: for dinos that once ruled the earth, the kind other dinos fled from in terror, this group is quite attuned to possible danger. Last week Winnie watched out the window as the meter reader entered her yard, whistling as usual. Just as they had done the last time he’d approached her house, the dinosaurs simply froze in place near the hedge. Among the heart-shaped leaves of morning glory and the spiky pyracantha, with sunlight falling erratically upon them, they were all but invisible. When the gate had safely clicked behind him and he was back in his truck, they came to life again. Did she imagine it or were they especially jubilant, as if they’d just played a magnificent trick?
Winnie would like nothing more than to have her best friend Carla over to see them, to marvel at their presence and all the possible reasons for it, but Carla’s in England on a fancy scholarship, trying to resurrect the theory of ley lines—alignments of places sacred to ancient peoples—and so busy she barely has time for email. Alas, Ross is the only other person on earth who knows about them, and he’s too bullheaded to believe they’re for real. And if he were to accept the idea, he’d reject them on aesthetic grounds alone. He hates antiques, anything that smacks of yesteryear, and although T. rex was modern so far as dinos went, it nevertheless lived sixty-five million years ago. Winnie looked up the comet called Chicxulub that bashed into the Yucatan around the time T. rex and other dinos disappeared. Could the ensuing global catastrophe have spared a few individuals? Could they have holed up all these years—let’s see, sixty-five thousand millennia—undetected? She could more easily believe in God, which she does not.
Eddy, Ma, Pam, she types into a single message, I appreciate your concern for my welfare, but I’m not unhappy & I’m not going back to Ross. Living alone suits me to a T!
Cheers, Winnie
P.S. Remember that old Sylvia cartoon where Harry the bartender wonders aloud what the world would be like without men & Sylvia says ‘No crime & a lot of fat, happy women’? I’m working on the fat part …
Winnie brings a glass of iced tea out to the porch and listens to Clappertown wind down. If she weren’t starting to worry about the dinos, life would be perfect. It’s a balmy evening, her gardenias are dishing out scent, and she has work she doesn’t mind doing. Her current list of assignments includes an essay by a an anthropologist on the return of Ishi’s brain from the Smithsonian, where it’s been languishing in a jar of formaldehyde, back to Northern California to be reunited with the rest of his body. The paper needs a lightweight overhaul, nothing more. Changing who’ses to whoses, etc., should do the trick. There’s also the draft of a friend’s novel that she’s reading for plot flaws and a grant proposal she’s vetting for a local nonprofit. Finally, there’s an article for Brave New Age, a well-funded metaphysical magazine whose publisher was Winnie’s first college lover—a sweet, long-haired boy who gave her up because their sun signs were incompatible. He regretted it after contracting a bad case of venereal warts from the girl he left her for, whose chart was agreeable in every way. Though Winnie refused to get sexually involved with Lance again they have remained good friends. In fact, she edits most of his magazine for him, and he in turn pays her well and sends her music downloads by great bands she’s never heard of, like the Gourds or the Suffering Fuckheads.
She might as well find out what’s going into the next BNA. Most of the time the stuff is way too la-la-la for her, but because its IQ is low she can knock out the edits in short order. This month’s feature appears to have been written by a bona fide scientist, an astronomer from Princeton. Winnie rechecks the school. Why on earth would a serious academic submit a paper to BNA? The first sentence answers her question: “After being turned down by all the professional journals in my field, I have decided to share with the readers of Brave New Age some new thoughts about the possibility of parallel worlds.” Titled “Mulling the Multiverse,” and refreshingly free of the kinds of basic grammar and usage mistakes found in most of BNA’s other articles (at least before Winnie works them over), it suggests that humans might exist in several worlds at once, though not be aware of it because consciousness is maddeningly loyal to one world. This world, thinks Winnie, the one you’re writing your paper in. Still, she reads through it several times, surprised as much by the quality of the prose as by the subject. She hasn’t had to make a single track-changes comment on it.
That night her dreams are filled with images of planets and mathematical symbols that mean nothing to her. The last thing she sees before the neighborhood roosters cut in is one of her dinos twirling a ring of Saturn around its belly as though it were a hula hoop.
***
Winnie’s imaginary conversation with her imaginary therapist:
W: What would you say if someone were to claim she had five dinosaur babies living in her yard?
T: Someone? Are you using the old third-person dodge here? Is this actually your yard?
W: Let’s say for the sake of argument it is. But let’s also say this person—okay, I—have never had delusions before, though who the hell knows when delusions are delusions? But there’s no mental illness in my family history unless voting Republican counts, in which case there’s far too much.
T: One can develop delusions without having a genetic predisposition. Have you experienced any stress in recent months?
W: Only divorce and a move, but I am fine with both of those. Really. I am. If you met my ex you’d see why.
T: I detect a hint of protesteth-too-much here.
W: Because I don’t know what to do about the dinosaurs!
***
Morning slips through the leafery into her yard. Winnie’s waking up more slowly than usual. By the time she’s poured her third cup of French roast—stint as she might on other luxuries, she refuses to drink lousy coffee—the dinos are on the back porch, clamoring for treats. Gone are the days when breakfast and dinner were enough. They’re simply insatiable now, and Winnie has taken to buying economy-sized boxes of dog biscuits at Costco to give out between meals.
“OK, guys, here you go,” she says, opening the screen door to toss large starch bones to the dinos. One of them, possibly the Einstein of the bunch, has backed up almost to the steps in order to capture his treat in midair. The others scramble for their share off the porch.
The ‘ping’ of an incoming email attracts Winnie back to the kitchen table. It’s Lance, his little bong-shaped avatar puffing digitized smoke next to a message. Hey Win, it says, what did you think of the piece by Dr. Hawes?
Who? For half a second Winnie wonders what the hell he’s talking about. Then she recalls the scientist and her theory of the multiverse. I don’t know about the overall premise, she types back, but the writing’s just fine. She hits “send” and leans back in her chair to yawn. Out of curiosity she does a quick search for ‘Francesca Hawes, multiverse’ and is surprised to see a Wikipedia entry about her at the top of the search list. And there it all is, Hawes’s biography, her work, the extensive criticism of her work, the less extensive defense of it, a long list of links and references, and a professional photograph. The good doctor looks surprisingly young and attractive. As usual, Winnie feels a pang. How must it feel to have achieved so much so early in life? To have had an expensive education, be not just all right to look at but beautiful? She’ll never know. The phone rings. It’s Lance once again.
“I just answered your email,” she says, picking up. “How did you snag such a class act?”
“She reached out to me, Win. Apparently, the scientific community is snubbing her big-time. We’re supposed to have coffee this afternoon.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“Mine. She’s interviewing for a position at Berkeley and …”
“… and you made up some business requiring your presence nearby.”
“Am I that transparent? Don’t answer, just tell me whether I should wear my corduroy sport coat with the elbow patches or a black turtleneck.”
“Let’s see … I doubt she’ll care, but you do look pretty in black.” Winnie smiles. Lance has aged absurdly well for an ex-hippie. And, like so many of the men Winnie finds attractive, he seems to understand that for a certain type of woman, over-grooming is a turn-off—too Ralph Reed or, god forbid, Eric Cantor. A little stubble is a good thing, and so is Lance’s deferential instinct when he’s around people smarter than he is. Maybe she should tell Lance about the dinos. At least he won’t condescend. He might even believe her.
“Lance, there’s something I want you to know.”
“Oh crap, Win, can it wait? The ad rep from some yoga clothing line is here. I forgot I scheduled an appointment this early in the day.”
“No big deal, I’ll catch you later. Good luck with the doctor.” She’s a little sad he can’t talk, but the coffee’s kicking in, and she hears a strange sound. In the yard the dinos are rubbing their hides against the camphor tree. Their little arms dangle limply as they hunch their backsides against the bark. Rucha rucha rucha. Winnie hopes they haven’t picked up some fungal infection or, worse, fleas. She’s been scrupulous in collecting their poop and depositing it in the far back corner of the yard around the base of an ailanthus. Already a vigorous tree, it has shot up like a bottle rocket, leafing out generously in all directions. The dinos’ nutrition concerns her. For a while, thinking they might need more protein, she had stirred raw eggs into their food, but one morning she recalled that birds are the descendants of dinos. Was it right to feed them their own kind? What if she was predisposing them to the saurian version of mad cow disease? Maybe they itch because their skin is stretching. Whenever her cousin Pam is pregnant—which in Winnie’s opinion is far too often—she complains about her belly itching and Winnie sends her aloe gel from California. Unfortunately, it would take about two hundred bottles of the stuff to treat the dinos. She imagines going to Whole Foods and buying up their entire stock. Not only would she need a second mortgage to afford it, she would have to come up with a reason for wanting it. “I suffer from eczema,” she says aloud and almost spills her coffee laughing. “Really terrible eczema.” And what if the clerk decided to challenge her? She might have to wear a burqa to forestall questioning.
Is she crazy? Surely it’s strange that she’s doing so much better than most freshly divorced women. Shouldn’t she be miserable? Trouble is, she doesn’t want to talk to a therapist about her marriage. Or her family. What she wants to talk about are the dinos. The therapist she needs would also have to be a paleontologist.
W: Please just tell me if it’s even possible for them to exist.
T/P: Well, sure, why not? I mean, technically, if the Russians can clone a wooly mammoth by sneaking its DNA into the nucleus of an elephant’s egg, why isn’t it possible someone’s done something similar with a tyrannosaurus?
W: But wouldn’t we have heard of such an experiment?
T/P: Look, humans can eat wooly mammoths. T. rex would eat us. If you were trying to resurrect something like that, you might want to keep it as secret as possible.
Exactly—what reason would there be to bring a monster back to life? She imagines the dinos grown up, her house and yard long since trashed, herself dead—isn’t it just a matter of time? Winnie refuses to follow that train of thought. Better to work, finish looking over that grant proposal before lunch.
That night, she’s enjoying a second glass of wine on the porch when her cell phone rings. Lance. That’s odd. Wouldn’t he and Dr. Hawes have let the coffee date segue into cocktails, dinner, and beyond by now?
“Where are you?” she asks.
“The Claremont.” He sounds high.
“Alone?”
“You won’t believe this, but when I was getting us a room Frannie ran into one of her old colleagues in the bar—she thinks he’s applying for the same position she is. They’re going to catch up for a little bit and I’m just hanging out here in a very expensive suite. Thought I’d find out what you wanted to tell me earlier.”
“That’s more considerate than you usually are, my friend. No offense.”
“None taken. You know me better than anyone. OK, so I want you to talk me down. I’m nervous, and since I don’t smoke …”
“Yes, you do!”
“Well, not tobacco. I fired up a bowl, of course.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“This woman is a genius, Win. I’m already worried about how the after-chat will go.”
You can thus block the email ids from all those from whom you do not have to here generic cialis in canada and there for learning the course and you’ll favour to take the Texas approved driving safety course in ninety days and ensuring you ace the check. viagra sample pills It also works by increasing levels of nitric oxide, which relaxes muscles surrounding blood vessels supplying the penis. When you’re masturbating to porn, don’t climax! Leave it for your partner. levitra generic cheap Maintain some distances- Sometimes distances are for betterment of the relationship, but not browse around for more now levitra uk emotional distances. “You’re over-thinking things, Lance. You guys will undoubtedly have great sex and then just fall asleep.” Or, she thinks, you will, and she will stare at you entangled in the sheets—your long, tanned back, that sweet curve of spine where your butt begins—and wonder whether she should bear your young. Winnie has always been able to appreciate the beauty of Lance without wanting it for herself. Even without venereal warts he would have been off-limits to her eventually. He loved her mind, he always said, and left it at that. She knew she was no match for him physically, and there was that theory about people eventually winding up with others of equivalent beauty.
“Which also makes me nervous. Because then we’ll wake up and I’ll have to keep her interested. I need to relax. So what’s up? Tell me something good.”
“OK, I will. But you can’t laugh, because this will probably make you think I’ve lost my mind.”
“Highly unlikely. Highly,” he says again, chuckling.
“No laughing!” She pauses, then just plunges in. “For the last few months I’ve been taking care of some young dinosaurs.”
She hears sputtering on his end, then a half-laugh, finally a little throat-clearing.
“In my yard, Lance. Really. I’m not kidding. They just showed up one day.”
“Dinosaurs, Winnie? But that’s impossible.” He’s lowered his voice. He sounds sad.
“I know. I didn’t believe it for the first couple of days, but they’re there, trust me. Not only that, they’re T. rexes. Listen, the only other person who knows is Ross, and he refuses to believe me—not that I blame him …”
“I’m pretty speechless myself, Win. Are you making this up? Because you have already pretty much cured my nervousness.”
“I’m serious. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m also desperate because they’re growing up fast and eating a shitload of food and I’m worried they’ll be killed if I tell anyone about them.”
“Worried they’ll be killed?”
“Right now they’re fine. They seem friendly even. I’ve gotten sort of attached to them, to tell you the truth.”
She hears nothing on his end.
“Lance? Lance, talk to me.”
“Sorry, Win. I was just thinking about something.” His voice has returned to its usual register, which both reassures and infuriates her. She can’t read the pause that follows his announcement.
“You can’t handle this, can you? After all the times I’ve listened to your …”
“Winnie, no! Relax. I was trying to remember something Frannie said tonight at dinner. It was complicated, but bear with me. Maybe it applies to your situation. She was talking about how there are something like 200 billion galaxies in the known universe alone, and ours is not the only one.”
“And? That’s not too complicated.” He’s high. She shouldn’t be wasting her time trying to make him believe her.
“She says there’s good reason to believe we’re something-something—hold on, it’s coming—entangled! That we’re entangled with counterparts elsewhere. Think about it—you and I might have counterparts in places we can’t even imagine. Can’t you almost feel it? I can.”
“I wonder if your counterpart is as baked as you are. Sorry, amigo, but what about this planet? How is it I have five baby dinosaurs in my yard? Is there some kind of time entanglement where they popped out of the Late Cretaceous into the here and now?”
“You got me there, Win. Well, Fran’s a scientist. Maybe she’ll have some ideas.” He sounds tentative at best.
Winnie feels immensely let down. But what did she expect? That her old friend would tell her what to do when he can barely even tie his shoes without getting loaded first?
“If she does, please have her give me a call ASAP. Well, not tonight, but soon. I mean it, Lance. And can we keep this among the three of us? I think Ross is about ready to send me to an asylum.”
“Ten-four. I can’t wait to tell Fran about your situation.”
Winnie clicks her phone shut and upends her wine glass, sorry there isn’t more than one last gulp left. A big moon is coming up over the doublewide across the street where half-blind Mrs. Morrison lives with her macaw, a fussy old bird that periodically renders the theme from Jeopardy! in a loud, manic cry. But everything is silent tonight. How many moons exist in this galaxy? How many people on how many other planets are watching them, hoping for answers to their questions? Eventually, the hound down the street begins to bay and under her porch the dinosaurs hear it in their sleep and resettle themselves between the pier blocks.
***
Winnie is a woman given to dreams of apocalypse. When she was young they tended to feature tornados approaching inexorably from the west, and she would be powerless to escape from them. Closer and closer the funnel clouds would churn, and just as they were ready to blow out the windows of her parents’ house she would awaken, her nightgown stuck to her back and legs, her throat dry. Later, after she married, her nightmares became more mundane though no less frightening. Often she and Ross would be at some fancy social affair and Winnie would realize she had forgotten to wear a skirt or, worse, that she couldn’t remember anyone’s name, thereby ruining Ross’s chance for a promotion he was counting on. Nowadays her bad dreams are all over the place, but they’re nothing like the worries she has while awake. She would gladly face ten tornadoes and twice as many cocktail parties if doing so would guarantee her dinos’ safe passage back to wherever they came from.
She is just shaking off the dregs of some nonsensical scenario in which a spiral galaxy has, like a flat-fold colander, suddenly lengthened its whirling self into, yes, a funnel—but one that sparkles like a chandelier as it bears down on Clappertown, ready to inhale her and the dinos—when her doorbell rings. Winnie quickly throws a kimono over her sleep shirt and rushes to the door. It’s Ross. He’s in bike shorts and jersey, his helmet dangling from his hand. What the hell is he doing here? And where oh where are the dinos? Wait, there they are, calm as statues against the raggedy hedge.
“Hello,” she says, her heart calming slightly. “You’re kind of out of your territory, aren’t you?” His tanned flesh looks pale compared with his shockingly bright cycling duds. He is peering at her carefully and she can smell his cologne under the perspiration he worked up pedaling from their old house in the burbs to Clappertown. Always the well-groomed man. She, by contrast, is a mess, her hair uncombed, a mild odor of sleep funk wafting about her.
“So where are they, Winnie?”
“Come on in and have some coffee. I’m not awake yet.”
“I’m wide awake. I don’t need any coffee. I want to see your dinosaurs.”
The steeliness of his voice alarms her. She pulls him into the house. This is not good. He should not be here and she should not under any circumstances show him the five T. rexes hiding in the shrubbery. Why did she ever tell him in the first place? Was it to prove to him her life needn’t include him to be miraculous? That whereas his office might get a spread in Architectural Digest, so freaking what—she can get dinosaurs to eat out of her hand?
“Well,” she says, pouring beans into the grinder, “it’s interesting that you chose today to come over and see them because they’re not here.”
“Right. Why does it not surprise me to find you lying again?” Ross is pissed, though that isn’t especially unusual. Lots of things annoy a man on the move in a world that just can’t keep up with him.
“Unlike you, I only lie about inconsequential things. Sit down, quit pacing around. You’re looking very trim, by the way—have you lost weight?”
“Don’t try to change the subject. I want to know why you find it amusing to make up stories about things that don’t exist. I think you need to see a shrink.”
“You’ve always thought I needed to see a shrink. It’s one of the main reasons I left.” She watches the coffee drip into the carafe and pours a cup as soon as there is enough for one. “There really are dinosaurs, Ross. I don’t know how, I certainly don’t know why, but they showed up one day and I need to figure out what to do about them.” She is trying to keep the panic out of her voice. Will they remain hidden until he’s gone? How long before they forget he’s there and start petitioning her for food? And then what?
Ross walks to the back door, looks out into the yard. “So where are they then? And for god’s sake, will you let me get someone in here to cut down that ailanthus? It’s going to take over the whole yard. It already has, actually.”
“I’m touched at your concern, but I think it’s beautiful. The Chinese call it the Tree of Heaven. As for the dinos, well, I think what happened is they took off into the slough last night when a car backfired. They startle easily.” Yes. An entirely plausible scenario. Didn’t Carla once try to persuade her the slough was on a ley line with an old tribal burial ground?
“You mean when some gangbanger shot at somebody. I don’t see how you can even live over here, Winnie. You should at least get a deadbolt and some iron grills over these windows.” He releases the shade on one of them and it rattles up so that the side yard is now in view. Part of it anyway. An orange-flowered trumpet vine catches the light. Luckily, it’s the only thing that does.
“It’s safer than you think. Nobody around here has anything worth stealing.” She needs to get him out of here stat, before the dinos decide it’s safe to show themselves. Would they do that? She doesn’t want to find out. “Listen, I have a lot of work I need to get to. I don’t mean to throw you out, but …”
“Fine. I was going anyway.” He puts his helmet on, which gives him the appearance of a space alien, and heads to the front door. “Looks like you have other visitors, though.”
Winnie wheels around to see an impossibly beautiful couple coming up the uneven brick walk. Their clothing is a little wrinkled and their eyes heavy-lidded with lust or slumber, Winnie can’t decide which.
“Knock, knock,” Lance laughs when he sees the door open. “Intergalactic dino patrol at your service.” He slaps a hand over his mouth as Ross steps out.
“You just missed them,” Ross says. “They have apparently fled.” He glares at Winnie briefly before pushing past Lance to wheel his bike—his extravagantly expensive bike—to the gate. Over his shoulder he adds, “If you hear a scream, Winnie, it’s your imagination running away with me.”
“Always so charming, isn’t he?” Lance mutters when Ross is out of sight. “Why did you ever marry the guy?”
Why indeed, wonders Winnie, so relieved that Ross is gone she almost feels faint. “I suppose I thought he would bring some balance to my life,” she says, holding her hand out to Dr. Hawes. “I’m Winnie and I am delighted to meet you.”
“Why do any of us marry?” answers Dr. Hawes. “I’m Fran and I too am an ex-wife. Where’s the step program for preventing such disasters in the first place? Entanglement,” she adds, “a lovely concept in physics, much more complicated among humans.”
“Thanks for coming by. I’m at my wits’ end.” Winnie gestures around her overgrown, fecund yard, and yes, there they are, holding themselves still in the flickering light of the hedge. She can see four of the five. Wait, there’s the other one, leaning somewhat languorously against the shady side of a camphor tree.
“They’re here, Win? Like, right now?” He and Fran are turning this way and that, but the dinos, experts at concealment, are holding themselves steady in the mottled light.
“Over there. They’re trying to blend in.” Winnie points again. “It’s a game they play.”
“I don’t see anything. Fran, do you?” To his credit, he is seriously looking.
“Not yet,” she says.
“There!” Winnie says. “By the pyracantha.”
But what’s going on? The dinosaurs are doing something very strange. They’re beginning to fade. Not fade, exactly—it’s more as though they’re depixelating, trading their molecules for those of the hedge. “Wait,” Winnie cries, unable to stop herself. “Don’t go!”
At that moment, as if on cue, Mrs. Morrison’s macaw begins wailing its favorite tune.
“Ancient history for five hundred,” says Lance, whirling toward the sound. “What the holy hell is that?”
But Winnie isn’t listening. She has rushed to the hedge, is running her hands along its prickly flank, probing it, peering into the branches. They are gone. Nothing of them remains. One of the tiny pyracantha thorns has caught a thread in the sleeve of her kimono and Winnie can feel it unraveling as she turns back to face her guests. She has the urge to weep. What kind of universe does she inhabit, where dinosaurs can just appear out of nowhere one day and disappear two months later? Where have they gone? Come back, come back, she thinks.
Lance and Fran have moved to the porch but are peering around and looking hopeful, as though Winnie might suddenly produce a bouquet of dinosaur balloons. Surprise! Here they are! Winnie feels a rush of tenderness for the dinos and a sense of abandonment that is equally strong. As she unsnags her sleeve from the thorn, though, she also feels joy stealing in. Wherever they’ve gone, it’s out of this world, and she is very grateful for that.
She will now go inside and offer breakfast to her friends. She will find a way to say they needn’t worry about her sanity, even though they will and she will; and when she is done telling them all about the dinos and Fran offers a theory in support of their existence that sounds as plausible as the one about the existence of God, which is to say not very, they will eat scones and drink coffee and find a way to change the subject to something they can all agree upon.
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About the Author
Beth Spencer is an editor who lives in Cohasset, California, with her husband and a very large malamute.
“Dinos” © 2012 Beth Spencer
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