By Nicholas Driscoll.
Art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
I thought about a lot of things inside the mouth of that old lizard as he shook me back and forth. I thought it was really slippery and slimy inside a dinosaur. I thought about the latest TV dramas I would probably miss that night as I was being digested in the stomach of an overgrown reptile. And I thought, yep. The old lizard, “King T-Rex” really is a tyrannosaurus.
You might think I would be screaming my head off, but such was strangely not the case. I was numb and scared and mute instead. Maybe when you are actually eaten by a dinosaur, you figure you really have nothing left to lose and there is just nothing to say. And, I mean, if you have to die anyway, it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic way to go than down the gullet of a previously extinct super predator, and you kinda just gotta accept it.
However, it smells very bad inside a dinosaur’s mouth. I don’t recommend the experience.
And the old lizard seemed determined to make the experience as unpleasant as possible, accomplishing said goal by physically turning me over and over with his enormous tongue, or nibbling at my sides with his ghastly blunt chompers. It was kind of freaky to be honest. I think I finally yelled at some point—I can’t remember clearly, but somehow I ended up with rex saliva in my mouth. My head clocked against the beast’s incisors and I blurted out some colorful profanities. At one point I believe that I accidentally belted the dinosaur’s uvula because the big shmuck choked and grunted and jerked in a way that I might have found funny if I hadn’t been inside his mouth. Then by some miracle of maneuvering I felt the beast tickling my armpit with the tip of his tongue, which might be the grossest thing that has ever happened to me.
And it was then, through the fog of fear and the crackling of panic, that I realized the old lizard wasn’t going to eat me.
A few moments later the mouth opened, light streamed in with a flash and a rush of air, a shock of cool assaulted my damp body, and then I was falling and waggling and spitting and gagging all at once before whomping to the sidewalk. The fall was abrupt and short, and I only had time for one burst of expletives before I crumpled in a pile, thankful and slimed, outside the dinosaur again.
“Well,” said the tyrannosaur, staring down at me. “What do you think? Am I really a tyrannosaurus?”
That grin on that lizard’s face was the biggest I had ever seen it. I crawled away from him in as dignified a manner as I could muster.
“Well,” I said, gulping for air. “Well. Well. Uh, well. You have a very convincing tongue. Very realistic. Still not sure what to think of your teeth, though.”
The tyrannosaurus cleared its throat.
“I have a very convincing stomach as well,” he said. “At least it’s been convincing enough for me as long as I have been alive. It reminds me regularly of its existence—but I never want to put YOU inside of it, no matter how hungry I might get.”
“Oh?” I said. “Because you are so fond of me, I suppose?”
The tyrannosaurs somehow raised a scaly eyebrow.
“You look terribly unappetizing now that I have seen you without your pants on,” he said.
I looked down. Sure enough, I had been completely depantsed at some point whilst inside the mouth of the monster. Somehow I had missed that minor detail in the process of savoring the unique experience of being vomited out onto my own lawn. I rather awkwardly flopped my hands about in a vain search for my misplaced trousers.
The tyrannosaurus coughed once, and my trousers came flying out of his open maw directly into my face.
“There you go,” said the tyrannosaurus. “Off to breakfast, then?”
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