By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
My head was still swimming with the nightmarish image of a floating, smiling Cheshire Rex as I bumbled back to my couch. I felt like I was one of those cartoon characters with exclamation points and question marks rocketing out of my skull. And as with any modern (or postmodern) person, I dealt with my anxiety and confusion by sitting on my couch and poking at my phone while looking at mindless, oversimplified memes about complex and controversial topics for a few minutes before moving on to an insultingly stupid television program analyzing recent important national problems with sex jokes and biased commentary.
Which frankly just increased my blood pressure rather than decreased it.
And this time, there was no knock. I heard something outside, and I was just starting to look up when I noticed that my door had been replaced by a very large hole and a dinosaur stuck was sticking its head through and into my house.
And that dinosaur was not Warbell.
Instead, it was another tyrannosaurus, only much, much bigger. Obviously this particular rex needed to crouch down lower than Warbell would have had to in order to stick its head inside. The coloration, too, wasn’t the same as Warbell’s. This one had splotches of black and orange, but the colors were dirty, smudged. Its eyes were also colder, and it had its set of sharp teeth. My skin prickled as it thrust its head inside.
“You are ambassador for the tyrannosaurus, yes?”
“No,” I said. “I quit. Go talk to Charlie next door. He would appreciate the company.”
I think I would have done about anything to get that thing’s head out of my front door.
But my colorful visitor would not be shaken off so easily. It took another small step forward, the lumpy, expressionless face turning towards me, and the whole in my wall shifting as if by magic to accommodate the dinosaur’s bulk.
“You were,” it said, slurring its words as it tried to work them out with its stiff lips. “You knew that dinosaur.”
It wasn’t very difficult to figure out who the newcomer was talking about.
“He lived in my garage,” I said. “What did you do to my door?”
“Garage?” the beast swung its bulky head and knocked over my hat stand. I was dismayed to see my nicest straw hat smashed against the floor, but I wasn’t about to move overly close to the strange dinosaur standing in my entry just to save my hat.
“Lived!” I barked. “Past tense! The old lizard isn’t there now! I kicked him out!”
“Kicked?” it said, swinging its head back towards me. “You kicked tyrannosaurus?”
“Yeah, and then he ate my leg,” I said sarcastically, and I showed the orange lizard my prosthesis. I wish I had been videoing because that dinosaur’s reaction was priceless. And put a hole in my ceiling.
“Ate your leg?” it said.
“Not really,” I said. “Look, I asked him impolitely to move somewhere new. To leave. I evicted him. But he didn’t eat my leg. What do you want? Are you going to replace my door? Or fix the hole in the ceiling?”
“I am looking for tyrannosaurus,” said the beast, looking back at me with inscrutable black eyes. “Because criminal.”