Month: May 2023

By me, with beautiful art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

By that point in the evening I was pretty tired, but that didn’t stop a huge barrage of questions to dance and surge through my mind like a murder of crows released in a cramped elevator. The thoughts that emerged were uncomfortable, they were scary, they were loud, and they felt like they were out of a horror movie.

“I shouldn’t talk about the kingdom from which I came,” Warbell said. “I left that place. I am actually a kind of defector, in a way. I am not supposed to be here. I chose to come for my own reasons, and not out of loyalty to… well, the name of our land also is not in English, but it translates to something like the Kingdom of all Eternity and Perfection of our People and the Future. Dinosaurs are fond of long names for things sometimes.”

“How do I know that the dinosaurs aren’t going to try to conquer all of humankind and reign again or something?” I asked. “What do you mean they have always visited? You mean like Nessie?”

Warbell worked his mouth into a grumbly frown, then nimbly extracted the garage remote from his pants and punched the “open” button by slapping it with his other hand. He then returned the remote to his pants and looked back up at me.

“Dinosaurs are not interested in living here, Walter,” he said. “Most don’t want to visit. Not really. They are scared to come because it’s dangerous, even with our technology. When we visit, most try to leave as soon as they can. Nessie… is a famous rebel. But I am not going to stand outside in the open and discuss the inner workings and the secrets of where I have come from with a cowering flea on a rooftop. I suggest you gather your courage and answer the phone ringing in your house. Maybe it is your employer. She was pretty disappointed in you because you did not meet with me tonight for our scheduled evening rendezvous. When you do reach a point in which you feel like fulfilling your duties as my official ambassador, please take note that I have cancelled all appointments for tomorrow in order to more actively investigate job opportunities in Final Pumpkin. Good night.”

Warbell then turned away and ducked into the garage. I felt the roof shake as his spine bumped up against the doorframe and there was a terrible grinding noise as the dinosaur’s thick hide raked against the wood. Moments later I heard the garage door rumbling closed. I waited around nervously until the door was all the way down, wondering who uses landlines to call anymore and grumbling about luddite mayors, but also feeling a little nervous about my position as dino-ambassador. I didn’t want to lose my job. I still wanted to keep an eye on Warbell to make sure he didn’t swallow everyone in town.

Well, maybe Charlie would be okay. Warbell could eat Charlie. I still didn’t have my truck back, after all.

I slid a ladder down off the roof, then clambered down, painfully aware of each clanking footstep, then took down the ladder and started for the garage to put it away. I stopped when I remembered I had a dinosaur living in my garage that I didn’t really want to talk with right at that moment. I just dropped the ladder on the lawn and opened my front door, my mind a cloud of frustration that suddenly cleared when I noticed something.

When I looked closer at my front door, I noticed there were several small patches in the wood that were in the same strange condition that had affected the wood at the library. The same strange web-like disintegrated areas, in three small patches that broke and fell away when I touched them.

I gritted my teeth, shrugged my shoulders and went inside. I would have to keep my eyes on that. That sort of weird phenomenon had been going on for years all over the city, but sometimes it could be really dangerous, and it could seemingly affect any kind of material—not just the wood. Not just houses. Furniture and machines and more.

Nobody knew what caused it, nor the limits of the damage it might eventually wreak. But what could we do but keep an eye on it for now?

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

Everyone at the park was pretty surprised when Warbell showed off his new, sleeker, more aerodynamic teeth. As usual there was a crowd. A number of people just wanted to take pictures or record the spectacle of a dinosaur eating an enormous beef lunch. Many in that crowd, when they saw Warbell’s killer bananas, shrieked and ran. However, I also heard a chorus of oohs, ahhs, and someone whispered “that’s so cool.”

I didn’t stick around long to chat with the locals or to listen to the barrage of questions (I heard somebody ask, “What is it like to eat a triceratops with THOSE teeth?”). I had more pressing issues at hand. For one, I realized in the hubbub of the day I had ripped my jeans something good. Thus very discreetly I drove home and left the gawkers and the rubberneckers behind.

I didn’t see Warbell for the rest of the day. Though I was supposed to meet him for supper (Warbell wanted to try to eat like a human, even though he said dinosaurs generally do not have three meals a day), I conveniently forgot and instead actively worked on the library wiring and passively worked on my tan. If roofers and construction workers can sometimes work shirtless, I have always figured that I could, too—especially as I had been so consumed with taking care of Warbell that I had forgotten to do the laundry all week.

When Warbell came back to the house, I was sitting on the roof watching movies on my cell phone. It was already past dark. We looked at each other, and I scooched a few more feet away from the edge.

“What are you doing on the roof?” asked Warbell.

I was relieved to see that his teeth had returned to abnormal and he no longer appeared to have a set of murder-tools in his mouth.

“Since when do dinosaurs have dentists?” I asked. “I want you to explain what you are.”

“Everyone was asking questions about my teeth today,” Warbell sighed. “I don’t understand. Wasn’t it obvious that I had had some work done on my teeth from the start?”

“Yes, but nothing made sense about you from the start!” I said. “Why can you just change your teeth like that? Why can you talk? Did you really sleep for millions of years?”

“I told you, I don’t know how long I slept,” Warbell said. “Time doesn’t have the same meaning for me. And I am wearing pants. Was that not a clue for you that there was a greater dinosaur civilization? Of course dinosaurs also have dentists. But I left that place. I am living here now, because Final Pumpkin is my home and my land.”

“That place?” I about yelled. I was standing on the roof now, holding my cell phone as if I was going to throw it at the big beast standing before me. “Where did you come from? Are the dinosaurs going to invade?”

“No, they are not going to invade,” Warbell said. “But they visit and have visited many times.”

Read the next chapter.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

Well, what do you think my response was? That’s right, I floored it. I pedaled as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast with all my stuff crammed together on my bike. I dreamed of flying all the way to Alaska and hiding in an igloo far away from every dinosaur in the world (or at least the one standing next to me at that moment).

As I was frantically pedaling down the street at an embarrassingly slow speed, Warbell matched my pace with a nonchalant stride and noticed that something was wrong.

“What’s your problem?” Warbell asked. “Yikes, I need to be careful with my tongue. It’s tricky speaking in English with these teeth.”

And it was true, Warbell’s pronunciation changed markedly just with the introduction of a different and more lethal set of dentures. And it was in that moment I realized that Warbell wasn’t chomping my body in half in a frenzy of blood and guts and carnivorous slobbering glee.

And since I hadn’t lost my guts yet, I gathered my guts up and asked a question. Albeit in a quivering, quavering little girl whimpering whine.

“Your, your, your teeth,” I said. Well, it was almost a question.

“Yes,” said the tyrannosaurus rex carefully. “These are the teeth I use when eating meat. You have a fork and a spoon, I have two sets of teeth that I can switch between. Are you ready to go to the park, because it’s in a different direction.”

“You, you, you could’ve eaten me! Bitten me in half! Chomped me to hamburger hash!” I blathered in a chunky spew of vocabulary stew.

“You could bite off your index finger if you really wanted to,” Warbell sniffed. “I am not in the least bit interested in eating you. That cow, on the other hand, sounds fantastic, so let’s go. My stomach is growling more than your neighbor’s dog every time I pass the house.”

“But how!” I said. “Your teeth, I mean!”

Warbell looked at me with a dino-expression of utter exasperation.

“We dinosaurs take our dental work very seriously,” he said. “You have to when you possess teeth the size of bananas. Shall we go?”

On the way to the park, with Warbell jogging placidly beside my bike, images of dinosaur dentists pranced and frolicked and pronounced “Say ahhhhh” in my mind. People say dentists are scary. They just got a lot scarier. And I don’t think they would have to ask me to say “ahhhhh”. I’d already be screaming in that dentist chair.

“I am working on a list of jobs I might be able to do,” said Warbell. “I would appreciate your opinion. Especially for a job in which I could converse with a wide variety of people.”

“Oh,”I said. “Talking to people.”

“What do you think about a policeman?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I would like to call the police right now.”

“I mean as a job for me,” said Warbell. “As a member of the police, I could talk to many people whether they wanted to talk to me or not. Why do you want to call the police? And isn’t the park over that way?”

I had missed my turn because I was thinking too much about calling the police and wondering about the utter terror of a dinosaur dentist and the horror of a banana-sized root canal. The way to the park felt like the longest single bike ride in my life.

Continue reading.

By me.

Art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

Eating out at restaurants for every meal with a dinosaur appetite was not going to work on a budgetary level nor a sanity level. The city was supposed to supply lunch for Warbell (according to my notes) but apparently they had forgotten or at any rate some sort of mistake had been made and a dinosaur had not been fed and now it was my problem.

“Can’t you just eat some leaves and twigs from a few local trees?” I asked as I walked Warbell out to my electrician’s bike. I liked to get some exercise and had outfitted my bicycle so that it could carry my toolbox and other essentials for smaller jobs.

“Yes, actually,” said Warbell. “But I was promised a lunch as king of the town, and I want to have my lunch. Also, I want to talk with you.”

“Did you meet with “Punchface” yet?” I asked. I looked over the dinosaur again, thinking about my theory. If Warbell really was a lady, I decided that t-rexes really have the ugliest females in the animal kingdom.

“Yes, it was a short meeting,” Warb said. “Punchface wants to have a boxing match with me.”

I almost tripped.

“Punchface wants to fight you?” I gasped.

“He wanted to meet and have a look at my hands to see if maybe I could wear boxing gloves, or if special gloves might be needed since my hands are pretty different from a human’s.”

I stared.

“You want to go through with this?”

Warbell tried to shrug, but his anatomy didn’t really allow for it.

“Why not?” he said. “My body might be very large, but my arms are not much bigger than a human’s. This match could show people that I can interact with them. Maybe it would help me to get a job.”

“Are you still on about that?” I asked. “You don’t need a job. Millions of lazy twentysomethings would die to be in your position.”

“I want to be able to talk to people more,” Warbell said. “I have questions about a lot of things, but people won’t talk to me openly even when I command them to.”

“What on earth do you want to know about?” I asked. “People are usually pretty friendly around here I think.”

“You wouldn’t tell me about your leg,” Warbell said. “The doctors wouldn’t tell me about the boy.”

I shook my head, folding up my sparky belt and tucking it into a compartment on my bike. I pulled out my cell phone.

“Health stuff is private stuff,” I said. “If you want to know about that, talk to old people. They love explaining everything about their aches and pains five times backwards and forwards, then start over again. Anyway, food, right? I’ll call and see about where the city can deliver your lunch, okay?”

After some confusion on the phone and a run around about who I needed to contact in order to find out who had the old lizard’s lunch on hand and where it would be best to eat it, we determined that the meal—a dead cow—would be delivered to Jackal Lantern Park at three. I relayed the message to the dinosaur and said I would take him over there and stuff my face on something, too, since official attendants got tummy needs, too.

“A dead cow?” asked Warb. “Didn’t I tell them I don’t need to eat meat, that vegetables are fine? Besides, I can’t eat an uncooked corpse with these teeth. These jaws are made for smiling, not for tearing flesh.”

“Yeah, well, what are you going to do?” I asked and started to climb onto my bike. “Just follow me over.”

“I guess there really is no choice in the matter, is there?” Warbell said. “It’s uncomfortable to change dentures, though.”

And with that, Warbell grimaced and grunted, and then his beautiful set of teeth instantly collapsed before my eyes into a wicked set of the long, sharp, serrated monster fangs of a real tyrannosaurus rex.

by Nicholas Driscoll–that dork.

Art by Sam Messerly–that fine gentleman.

Click here to read from the beginning.

I had been knocking around the idea in my head for some time, really. The rocks I had found underneath my house were uniform in size and round and large. Each was about the size of a football. I had looked up dinosaur egg fossils on the Internet and found that they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and while none of the pictures I found on the Internet looked exactly like the ones I found, I figured eggs in the real shell would probably look a bit different than fossils anyway. Why wouldn’t they?

And if Warb was really here laying eggs underneath folks’ houses… Well, the implications were pretty scary. To me, it would explain why Warb wanted to live in my garage rather than anyone else’s, and also why he wanted to live in this city at all. And it could also mean that he or she was planning to feed something to his dinosaur babies after they hatched… such as, I don’t know.

Me.

So while I was impressed by Warb’s going out of his way to help that kid from Six Degrees of Bacon, at the same time I couldn’t help but wonder if something more sinister was going on. Maybe he was just saving the kid’s life so there would be more to feed the baby lizards once they hatched. Maybe Warb wasn’t a guy at all.

I mean, I can’t tell a tyrannosaurus’ sex.

Colander had listened to my theories, making her soft quips and jabs as she does. But she agreed with me that the rocks sounded pretty weird, and nodded and tut-tutted when I showed her pictures on my phone. She had been a bit of a rock-hound in her youth, and she agreed to meet with me the upcoming Saturday afternoon at two to investigate the rocks. That same day Warb had an appointment with an advertising company that wanted to feature the old lizard in some commercial selling the latest cell phone—apparently it had a particularly ergonomic structure so ‘even if you only have two fingers, you can use it.’ It was the one of three advertising companies that wanted to meet with Warb that week.

The rest of the morning was drilling holes, threading blue plastic tubing through them, hooking the tubes up to the light switch boxes, then pulling wire through the tubes to hook the switches to the lights. In order to do that, I had to grab the right number of wires, slip a wire net like contraption over their collected tips, slide a lead wire through the blue tube, hook that wire to the wired net that held the tips of the wires, then pull the whole shebang through the tube to their destination (sometimes with the help of lube to make the wires slip through easier). After I had pulled the wire through the tube, I could cut the wire and start splicing.

As I was working on those things, I started to notice something rather odd about the wooden planks. The wood wasn’t as even as it should have been. In fact, it wasn’t as even as it had been the last time I had been in the building. And it wasn’t just on small areas. I noticed a number of places where bits and pieces of the planks had been chipped out or eaten away or… something.

I looked closer. It didn’t look like insects had been chewing away at the wood. It wasn’t wormy holes. It also didn’t look like someone had chipped away at the wood. Instead, there were filmy bits where the wood was weakened, as if parts had suddenly just rotted away, but not in any regular pattern. Like somehow the wood had been reduced to a random web of pulp in places.

It wasn’t everywhere, but the spots were noticeable on most of the boards, and the longer I worked, the more of them I noticed. I was no carpenter, but I decided to recommend to Colander that she get the planks inspected and maybe replaced. This, unfortunately, was not the first time we had seen this sort of phenomenon, and it could cause huge problems.

I was just about to go talk with her when I turned around and nearly jumped out of my skin.

“It’s 2:30 and I’m hungry,” said Warbell, standing just outside the library expansion with a sour expression.

Continue reading.

By Nicholas Elton Driscoll

Art by Sam “Rambo” Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

“Hello, oh late one.”

It was Colander Caracal, the librarian. Today she was wearing an eyepatch with a picture of an eyeball on it, and she had stacks of books like miniature skyscrapers at both her sides. And she was smiling that grin of hers that reached for one eye on one side, dimpled the cheek on the other.

“I had a bit of an adventure this morning,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe.”

“You live with a dinosaur now, Walter,” she said. “By definition your life is hard to believe. How’s the new ambassador job?”

I shrugged and adjusted my work belt.

“I got to taste dinosaur spit this morning,” I said.

Colander raised an eyebrow over her eye patch, and the image of the eyeball bounced excitedly.

“What kind of ambassador are you anyway?”

“A sore one,” I said. “I think my shoulders are going to be so blue I am considering starting a music group. I’ve got plenty of plastic tubes I can bang on.”

Colander started walking me to the new area of the Final Pumpkin Public Library, an expansion long overdue at a library overflowing with too many books as well as an excess of warmth to go around for anyone who visited. We passed a line-up of brats on the computers who were playing the latest idiotic webgame—Fartnight, a game in which you have to fart, but you don’t want to wake your family or something. I don’t know, I haven’t played it… much.

“I heard your dinosaur friend saved a boy’s life today,” Colander said. “You must be a proud dino daddy.”

“News travels fast,” I said. “But it’s true—I always thought that carnosaur would probably put some people in the hospital, but I didn’t expect it would be like that. I couldn’t believe it.”

I started cutting smurf tube to feed through the incomplete walls of the expansion as we talked. In all the craziness of the last few weeks, it felt good to have something that felt close to a normal conversation for once.

“Several people went to the hospital today,” Colander said quietly.

I froze.

“It happened again,” I said.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Colander nodding.

“Looks that way,” she said. “Still too early to know what caused it I guess. Well, I mean, we don’t really know what happened the first time.”

“Or the second,” I said. “Or the third. How bad was it this time?”

“Three people,” she said. “One died.”

“Right,” I said. “So we have these mysterious deaths and injuries or whatever you want to call them. Cell phones and computers conk out and break down at an extraordinary rate in our city, which keeps me busy and in the money at least. But also buildings fall apart for no reason. I’m still single. And now we have a dinosaur. A dinosaur that talks and smiles and says it’s our king. What’s next? And what the heck does this dinosaur want anyway? He was talking about getting a job today!”

Colander ran her finger across the nearest plank of wood and flicked dust off her fingertips, folded her arms and leaned against an incomplete pillar.

“Maybe he should start a t-shirt company,” she said. “You know, t-rex. T-shirts. T-riffic.”

I shook my head, bizarre images of Warbell sitting at a sewing machine intruding into my mind.

“No, I want to figure what the doodle is going on,” I said. “For real. It’s been bothering me. There has to be some explanation, and I am not sure it’s going to be a happy one. Maybe you can help me out, actually, Colander. You’re a smart woman.”

“I admit it, I am,” she said.  “Though if I was really smart, I would probably say no to your wild schemes.”

“I have a theory about this dinosaur,” I said. “And I found something to back it up.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I found some strange stones,” I said. “And I wonder if they might actually be dinosaur eggs.”

Read the next chapter.