By Nicholas Driscoll, NOT a super genius.
Art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
Now on the one hand, I didn’t really have much of an appetite for breakfast after having just been eaten myself by the tyrannosaurus who was staying in my garage. But on the other hand, it is also very difficult to say “no” to a tyrannosaurus after he has just demonstrated that he is fully capable of swallowing you whole.
“Don’t ever do that again,” I said, starting to put on my pants. “You asked to eat a breakfast WITH me, not eat a breakfast OF me.”
“I wasn’t asking,” said the tyrannosaurus. “I was commanding. Also, your right leg. It’s fake. Why?”
Charlie was peering out the window of his house at me with a horrified expression. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have wanted to see him on the lawn in his underwear, either. I hastily buttoned my trousers.
“I lost my right leg,” I said. “And I never found it again.”
“What do you mean?” said the tyrannosaurus.
“Maybe I cut it off myself,” I said. “Maybe a dinosaur ate it with a side of BBQ sauce. Maybe Charlie borrowed my leg and never gave it back. Who knows? Let’s get breakfast.”
“I command that you tell me what happened to your leg,” the tyrannosaurus said.
That was enough for one morning. Sometimes a time comes in life when you have to stand up for yourself, or else the next time you get bullied you won’t have one leg left to stand on. This was one of those times, almost literally.
“It is none of your business!” I exclaimed. “You may be the king of the dinosaurs and you may be living in my garage and I may be your official ambassador, but we aren’t close buddies and I don’t owe you an explanation of every private story from my life! So zip it and go eat a drumstick at the local Chicken Chunks Restaurant if you are that interested in legs all of a sudden!”
The dinosaur looked at me with an expression of lizardly contemplation. Well, I don’t know what the emotion was really. I can’t read dinosaur feelings well, and from what I was learning, dinosaurs don’t have much of a variety of facial expressions.
“I respect you,” said the tyrannosaurus. “I expected that you would do everything I said after I almost ate you alive.”
“I am stubborn,” I said. “Also, there has to be a law against trying to eat someone like that.”
“I think you will find that there is no law against a tyrannosaurus chomping on a human being. Especially if that tyrannosaurus happens to be the king of the local lands. Peasant.”
The tyrannosaurus gave me some kind of incredibly patronizing grin, and those enormous ivories glimmered in the morning sunlight. I wondered about the feasibility of locking up a socially inept extinct monster in the local hoosegow.
“Shall we go eat breakfast now?” asked the dinosaur.
“Okay,” I sighed.
Some fights just aren’t worth it.
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