By Nicholas Driscoll (obviously).
Art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to start at the beginning.
I sat on a bench in front of Six Degrees of Bacon next to a statue of a wild boar wearing a cheap plastic graduation gown. I took a sip of my hickory-smoked bacon flavored coffee and adjusted my new hat. The hat grunted and squealed whenever I touched it, but I was too tired to throw it to the ground of the parking lot and stomp the electronics to bits. And anyway, bizarrely, some part of me found the entire situation really funny.
It was a pretty small part of me, though. A big part of me resented this whole ridiculous outing. Also, I didn’t know what to make of this bizarre talking prehistoric monster in jeans. I just kept wondering if I could trust this old lizard, why he was here, if he was really going to eat all of humanity. But it seemed like a good thing that someone careful and reasonably intelligent like me was keeping a watch on him.
“You don’t have to wear the hat,” said the dinosaur after swallowing down the Heaven Bacon in two huge chomps. “It does look good on you, though.
“Thanks,” I said. “By the way, as long as we are doing this whole ambassador thing, well… what should I call you? Do you have an actual name? I don’t want to call you King T-Rex—it sounds ridiculous.”
The old lizard popped a trotter in his mouth, crunched it noisily.
“You can call me ‘your majesty’ if you like,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
The dinosaur grinned.
“I do have a name, but it’s not really an English name,” he said. “Not like Mike or Billy or Sue or something like that.”
“Well?” I said. “What is it?”
The old lizard snuffled and kind of made a deep belching wheeze, then slurped his Bacon Pho Sure. I waited.
“Are you going to tell me?” I asked again.
“I just did,” said the dinosaur. “But it changes depending on whether the name is in the subject position, or if it is in the object position in the sentence. And it changes depending on who is speaking.”
“Wait, wait, that gaseous explosion is your name?” I said.
The dinosaur speared a bacon-wrapped dumpling on one claw, then flicked it expertly into his maw.
“Only in the subject position,” he said. “In the object position in the sentence, you add this warble, and the tone of the growl is different. It kind of has a rising tone.”
And the dinosaur let out a shimmering belch-wheeze-whoop that about broke my eardrums.
“I’ll just call you Warbell, okay?” I said.
“And your name is Walter Finneson,” said Warbell. “That is the full name on all of your mail. I will call you Wal as I did before.”
“Not Wally?” I said. “Not even Walt?”
“I think ‘Wal’ suits you better.”
A number of unflattering explanations for why “wall” might ‘suit me better’ in the eyes of this ridiculous reptile bubbled up in my mind, but I brushed them aside with a long sip of bacony coffee and then stood up.
“Well, ‘Wal’ needs to get to work,” I said. “Because ‘Wal’ has better things to do than sit and make up terrible nicknames all day.”
I turned and tossed my empty cup into a pig-shaped trash can and saw the kid from the drive-through coming out the front of the restaurant with an anxious expression.
“How is the food tasting?” he asked. “I hope the Heaven Bacon doesn’t taste like asphalt. It’s supposed to be served over a fire in the main building, but—”
And here the kid choked, his hand grasping at his chest. A blotch of red appeared on his shirt, spreading rapidly, and he fell flat on the ground, twitching and screaming in pain.
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