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.