Fifty Dinosaurs

Robert Reed

After a long while in which nothing much happened, Kelvin spied an odd creature strolling peacefully across a distant clearing. For no obvious reason, he assumed that he was watching a sauropod. A brontosaur, or were they called apatosaurs these days? Whatever the species, it had a vivid orange body sporting a long neck and an even longer tail. It looked like a garish barn set high on four thick pillars. To Kelvin, the effect was cheap and a little silly, although he couldn’t say where those impressions came from, or why he was so surprised and maybe a little bit hurt when the dinosaur paid absolutely no attention to him.

Without a second thought, Kelvin began to chase after it.

Why that seemed reasonable was another mystery. But he ran until he was exhausted, and that taught him two lessons. First of all, he had gained a good deal of weight since his arrival. And second, this dimly lit, largely incomprehensible landscape was even larger than he had imagined. Just reaching the clearing took forever, or so it seemed.

Kelvin collapsed against one of the giant gray pillars. After some curative panting he opened his backpack and removed a tall bottle filled with cool, delicious water. Head back, he drank his fill, eyes stared at the milky white sky. His pack had been lying beside him when he first woke in this very odd realm. Its water bottle was always filled. That was a lesson learned early, and he didn’t puzzle over it anymore. And the satchels beneath the bottle were constantly jammed with tasty, nutritious, and oftentimes warm foods. There were also two changes of clothing, perpetually clean and neatly folded, and a toiletry kit complete with an endless roll of perfumed toilet paper. At the bottom of the pack, under the balled-up white socks, somebody had painted a twisted black symbol on the pale blue fabric that matched the substantial tattoo Kelvin had discovered emblazoned on his own chest.

The symbol meant “37.” He felt sure about it, but why he should be certain was another nagging mystery.

What was this place? And how much time had passed since his arrival?

Those were two more perfectly respectable questions leading to the critical issue of who might have brought him here, and why. Because some force or agent had to be responsible, and in Kelvin’s bones, he felt that some grand purpose was at work in this enormous and exceptionally strange realm.

Following habits that were weeks or months old, Kelvin ate his fill and then stripped, stowing his sweaty clothes before putting on fresh garb. But as he struggled with the tight-fitting trousers, a big mouth somewhere behind him took a sudden deep breath. A moment later he heard long feet padding across the hard black ground.

A second dinosaur walked around the pillar, sniffing at the dry warm air.

Kelvin froze.

This was no sauropod. By the looks of it the creature was a T. rex, except that its body was barely twice as large as Kelvin’s, if that, and its flesh was a strange combination of buttery yellow adorned with narrow crimson streaks. The dinosaur moved in a straight line, following a scent that might be hours old. (Calculating time was close to impossible here.) Those tiny front arms were held close to the muscular body. The stout tail rose high, revealing the bird-like cloaca. Then at what seemed like a random spot, the dinosaur bent low and took a huge wet breath. A quiet voice announced, “Don’t try it.”

Kelvin gasped.

“Are you going to try it?” the creature asked. Then it turned and looked back at him, the mouth changing in some very undinosaur-like ways. “You want to attack me. Don’t you, ape-man?”

“No,” Kelvin managed.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.” Hurriedly jacking up his pants, he managed to add, “And how can you talk?”

“You’re talking.”

“But you don’t have a real voice,” the human maintained. “Screeches, maybe. But you can’t make actual words.”

Not only could the mouth produce speech, but it could also laugh. And those widely spaced eyes were capable of a decidedly mocking expression. “So you’re the human being? The greatest, goriest murderer in history? I was wondering when I’d trip over your old bones.”

A flock of new questions demanded to be asked. Kelvin offered the most obvious. “What do you mean? Who’s a murderer?”

“Humans were.”

“Were?”

“As ruthless as any asteroid, except their mayhem was for profit. For fun. For sport, and in the service of ignorance and laziness.”

Kelvin was too stunned to react.

“Humans,” his companion repeated. “Yes, I know all about your notorious kind.”

“And I know about you,” Kelvin managed. “You’re a dinosaur. With a tiny, smooth brain and no lips-”

“Is that what I am?”

Embarrassed, Kelvin admitted, “Or maybe you’re something else.”

“Thank you for noticing.”

“But what are you?”

“Whatever I am, it happens to be similar to what you are,” the creature warned. “Each of us is a representative. You and I correspond to two species. And each of us enjoys a glancing resemblance to our namesakes. Which implies that you aren’t truly human, if you see my point.”

“Then what am I?”

That question earned another laugh, long and high-pitched. “Do you know anything at all, human?”

“My name’s Kelvin.”

“Sandra,” the dinosaur said instantly.

“What?”

“My name is Sandra,” it said. She said. “Do me the favor of using it, please.”

“Sandra.”

“Hello, Kelvin. How are you today?”

He sat down, exhausted in so many ways.

“You haven’t met anybody else, have you? Since you were deposited inside this extraordinary place, I mean.”

“Nobody,” Kelvin muttered. Then he added, “Wait. I saw a big brontosaur around here somewhere.”

“Orange, was it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s no dinosaur. Not even a pretend one.”

Those words only sounded simple. Kelvin couldn’t understand: What was this apparition telling him? And could he believe anything that came out of that unlikely mouth?

“The orange beast stems from an even more ancient era.”

“More ancient than when?”

“Our times, of course.”

The little T. rex had worked her way closer to him, and now Kelvin realized that her chest was decorated with a symbol that shared no resemblance to human writing. Yet he understood that the mark meant 28.

“So I’m your first association. What an honor that is.”

Kelvin shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. “How many ‘associations’ have you made?”

“Fourteen,” Sandra the dinosaur boasted. Then with a razor-toothed smile, she added, “For me, you are number fifteen. Which leaves me with how many more to meet?”

“Thirty-four,” Kelvin blurted.

“And how did you know that?”

“I just do.”

“And are you a genuine authentic and official human being?”

“No,” he admitted.

“But you wear your body well,” Sandra reported, reaching out with one of her tiny arms, a single claw resting in the dimple on his robin’s-egg blue cheek.

* * * *

They walked together, managing a steady pace. Eventually the T. rex made inquiries about Kelvin’s present life. How much ground had he covered; how many times had he slept? And had he ever found any edge to this landscape of randomly positioned gray columns? The human felt sure only about his last answer: No, the bizarre forest was endless. Then Sandra winked at him with one of her bright, hawk-like eyes, wondering aloud, “What do you remember about your past life?”

Past and present were separate subjects, a rigid line of demarcation standing between this bland existence and his familiar, reassuring history.

“What do you want to know?” asked Kelvin.

“Did you have parents?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Describe your father to me.”

“Tall,” he blurted. “And old, particularly in the face and hands.”

“Could you tell your father from any other tall old men?”

“I would hope so,” he reasoned.

“So what color is Daddy’s hair?”

He wasn’t sure.

“What clothes did he like to wear?”

Kelvin closed his eyes, concentrating.

“And what was his first name?”

Placing both hands against the sides of his head, Kelvin pressed until he felt an ache, that mild discomfort helping him believe that he must be real. “His name was Kelvin.”

“Now is that true?”

The human believed his words when he said them. But hearing the dinosaur’s doubt made him feel like a liar caught at the worst possible moment.

“So do you remember your father?” he asked Sandra.

“Why would I? My mother raised me as well as my three nest-mates. She fed us and defended us until we were old enough to hunt on our own.”

“What was her name?”

“She didn’t need a name, little human. She was only a dinosaur.”

“But you have a name,” he pointed out.

“A set of sounds that cling to my present skin.”

Kelvin nodded, pretending to understand.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

They had been following the scent trail of that great orange beast. At least that’s what Sandra claimed they were doing. Kelvin shook his pack, reassured by the weight of fresh food waiting for his stomach.

“I’m ravenous too,” she confessed. And with that, she suddenly danced off to the side, tilting her head expectantly, her big eyes studying a random patch of black ground. Suddenly a low-built, platypus-like creature blinked into existence. Sandra calmly pinned it with one foot, removing its head with a surgical bite. Two gulps, and the snack vanished.

Contemplating those jaws, Kelvin felt uneasy.

Did she sense his nervousness? Somewhere in his former life, he had learned that meat-eaters could taste fear in others.

His companion smiled amiably, and winked. “Of course you don’t realize this. How could you, since you’ve never met anyone else? But each of us gets to eat and drink through whatever route is most natural.”

Kelvin hadn’t considered the issue.

“When Reggie’s hungry, the floor sprouts stromatolites covered with bacterial mats. With Theresa, a convenient electrical plug appears.”

“Reggie?”

“A trilobite.”

The image of a hard-shelled undersea bug came to mind. “And what was the other name? Theresa?”

“A Lyttle-Tang AI hard-drive,” Sandra mentioned. “When your deadly species fell into its well-earned obscurity, the hard-drives inherited the earth as well as the nearby cosmos.”

“How do you know this?”

“Make a guess.”

“Theresa told you.”

“She told me all about her machine world. Which was decorated, she mentioned, with a lot of freshly-killed humans.”

Kelvin glanced over a shoulder.

“Theresa’s not back there.”

Maybe not. But for just a moment, he thought he could make out a shape in the distance - something passing slowly and soundlessly between two of the towering pillars.

“So what is this place?” he asked again.

“Tell me what you see.”

He spoke about the forest of smooth gray pillars and the black floor and the soothing white light that felt as distant as the stars.

The dinosaur seemed to listen, nodding thoughtfully. And then her rubbery lips twisted, producing a wide smile. “You know, most descriptions of the universe are similar to what you are describing to me. The cosmos is a vast, nearly empty room built upon a few repeating elements, and most locations are desperately similar to every other. Isn’t that a fair stereotype? Giant galactic structures strewn like walls across the black cold void. And from a distance, everything looks to be rather boring.”

Kelvin shrugged.

“By contrast,” she mentioned, “what we see here is quite tiny.”

“Tiny?”

“In human terms, yes.”

“It doesn’t feel small.”

But Sandra didn’t wish to explain herself. The smile was mysterious and, despite the bright long teeth, there was no sense of menace. The golden eyes revealed nothing beyond her benign amusement. Suddenly a burp emerged, wet and warm, and then she turned abruptly and began to march on, her nose dipping to absorb another trace of whatever creature they were following together.

Kelvin jogged to match her pace.

“How old are you?” she asked suddenly.

Without hesitation, he said, “Twenty-one.”

“A young man, are you?”

“I guess.”

“So, Kelvin. What about that day when you turned twenty-one? Do you remember anything in particular?”

He recalled all of it.

Easily and perfectly, yes.

* * * *

With considerable pleasure, Kelvin described how he had slept late on his birthday, missing every morning class, and then rolled out of bed and dressed in yesterday’s jeans and a fresh shirt before marching off to the cafeteria to eat lunch. He sat with friends; he could recall everyone’s face, everyone’s clothes. He knew their manners and habits and favorite phrases. Young masculine voices came back to him in detail. With everybody talking at once, the gang made plans for the evening. “You’re legal tonight,” they told Kelvin. He remembered being happy and excited. Then the young men got a round of cold sweet ice cream cones and sat watching the girls pass by. With the crass certainty of youth, they critiqued every breast and leg and wiggling rear end.

Kelvin paused

After a moment’s reflection, he asked, “How do I remember this? My father’s face and name are gone, but not the butt of a nineteen year-old blonde.”

“That is a very reasonable question,” the dinosaur agreed.

“And I know my friends’ names, and half the faces on campus. I was a junior. It was spring. There was sun that day, and then clouds, and then sun again. When I was walking to my afternoon class I saw a robin on the sidewalk, picking up a chunk of worm.” He hesitated for a moment, and then smiled. “Birds are dinosaurs, you know.”

“I am not,” said Sandra.

“But you are. Avians are only survivors from the dinosaur line. I learned that from Vertebrate Zoology.”

With scorn, his companion stared back at him. Then she looked ahead, asking, “Was that your afternoon class? Liar’s Zoology?”

“No, it was-”

“Don’t tell me,” she interrupted, bumping him with her strong yellow tail. “It was a computer class, and you were learning about thinking machines.”

He nodded, impressed.

“It wasn’t much of a trick,” she confessed. “Since each of us is tied together in some little way or another.”

“Each of whom?”

“The Fifty, of course.”

“And who does the tying?”

Focusing on a distant point, she grinned.

“You’re sure there are fifty of us?” he asked.

“Tell me about your computer class,” Sandra persisted.

Kelvin remembered sitting up front in the lecture hall. After a few minutes of reading from notes, their grumpy little professor had announced a special guest. Moments later, the prototype of a new AI rolled in from the hallway. The machine was tiny and very simple in appearance - a plastic box with wheels and little jointed arms and electrical leads and an assortment of plug-ins. But the voice that spoke to them was decidedly female.

Pausing, he asked, “What does Theresa look like?”

“Take a guess,” the dinosaur advised.

He knew. And that’s when Kelvin accepted that his intuitions were rock-solid, at least when it came to his clearest memories.

Again he asked, “Who does the tying? Who’s in charge here?”

But Sandra steered him back to his birthday. “Perhaps you’ll find an insight lurking here. Yes? The one slice of your life that is important enough to remember in full. Your parents are minimally rendered, like the rest of your childhood. But here stands that luminous day when you officially and forever moved from youth into full adulthood.”

He shivered, though he wasn’t sure why.

“What was the word?” she asked. “‘Legal,’ was it? What does that mean, Kelvin?”

“Alcohol,” he replied.

“Which is what? Explain it to me.”

The yeasty taste of beer instantly filled his mouth, and his good friends were leading him from one crowded bar, to another, then to a third, and in that realm of bright lights and shouts and painfully loud music, the newly created man graduated to some peculiar drink called a “slam-dunk.” His happy mood turned into a buoyant fearlessness. He was certain that he was badly drunk, yet his memories remained whole. Indeed, his recall seemed to be improving. A box that resembled Theresa was propped on a little stage at one end of a very long room, and drunken patrons were happily signing up, begging for the honor of singing badly while pieces of recorded music played in the background.

Sandra was sniffing the air again, and she was walking faster.

Maybe she wasn’t listening anymore. But Kelvin found himself explaining how his friends had put his name on the list to sing, and with just one person ahead of him, he fumbled his slam-dunk, dropping it into his lap and leaving his crotch soaked through.

The dinosaur paused suddenly.

Distracted, Kelvin continued walking, speaking in a low obsessed voice until he felt the sharp tips of teeth grabbing him from behind, piercing his shirt in a dozen places.

“Wait,” she whispered.

Ahead of them stood a creature that looked familiar, except it wasn’t. The orange was the same shade he had seen earlier, and something about the roundness of the body was exactly as he had expected. But there were no legs, just hundreds of cilia, a portion of them woven together to create four pillar-like ropes that carried the rounded body. What he had assumed was a neck and a tail were nothing but flagella emerging from the same end of the beast, long and stiff but capable of being twisted to the front and back again - rigid propellers devised by nature to push a microbe through the viscous heart of a pond or tidal pool.

“Quiet,” Sandra advised.

“What is it?”

But she preferred answering a different question. “Imagine that you are a very important entity. You are a powerful wise and brilliant soul on the brink of becoming a full-fledged adult. I’m not talking about being human. Or being even a tyrannosaur, for that matter. And instead of reaching twenty-one years of age, our prince is achieving that rich sweet age of fifty.”

“Half a century?”

“Hardly,” she said. “In this kingdom, years do not matter.”

“What does matter?”

“A celebration has been planned in the great prince’s honor, Kelvin. And for the fun of it, the souls responsible for this happy event have created fifty party favors. Fifty representatives pulled from prehistory. The fifty most important rulers known to the earth and its little corner of the universe.”

“Fifty dinosaurs,” Kelvin muttered.

“Three dinosaurs and two hairy primates,” the little T. rex corrected. Then she winked at him, adding, “But mostly microbes and machines. As it happens, those are the characters that dominate any authentic story about life. Slime and wires; bacteria and batteries.”

Kelvin spent a moment contemplating the vastness around them.

“The two of us, my human dear… my sweet Kelvin… we are little more than transitional forms swimming between what really matters…”

* * * *

The giant microbe had no eyes, but it must have sensed the vibrations of footsteps and quiet conversation.

It had no mouth, but a vacuole near the flagellum served that purpose nicely.

“I feel two bodies lurking,” it claimed.

“Not lurking,” Sandra replied. “We are admiring you, friend.”

“As you should,” the entity rumbled. “As is right.”

Perhaps they were nothing but party favors, Kelvin reflected. But oversized egos seemed mandatory.

Sandra introduced the two of them, giving names and numbers. “And what do we call you, glorious sir?”

“I am Barry,” the vacuole replied.

Kelvin nearly laughed, then thought better of it.

“I am Nine,” Barry reported. “The first eukaryote.”

“You are an astonishment,” the dinosaur called out. Then she winked at Kelvin, as if to say, “Play along with me.”

“Step close,” their new friend told them. “Let me feel your tiny bodies.”

It took courage to walk up to the building-sized creature, but the cilia proved soft and soothing to the touch. Kelvin found the experience to be nothing but a pleasure.

Barry asked whom else they had met in their wanderings.

Knowing nothing about any others, Kelvin sat and opened his pack, drinking his bottle dry and eating heartily. By then, the orange microbe was listing the names and species of the other entities that he had caressed during his travels, and he repeated each of their long stories - a business that took long enough so that the ignored human could change clothes and relieve himself behind the nearest pillar and still have time for a quick nap.

He woke to discover himself alone.

Jumping up, he called out for Sandra. “Where are you? Where have you gone?” But she was just a little way behind him, looking back with her tail high in the air, eyes mischievous, something about his panic worth a long, teasing giggle.

“Didn’t you hear me calling?” she asked.

No, he was too busy dreaming.

“We’re going to wander along with Barry for now,” she explained. “We need to find the rest of the Fifty. Come now! Everyone is needed.”

Needed for what?

But he didn’t ask. There had to be some rationale at work here, and he was tired of asking obvious questions, supplying the comedic relief for their slowly growing herd.

They walked.

In a useless attempt to measure the passage of time, Kelvin counted his strides, a thousand at a time. Once all of his fingers were extended, ten thousand steps had been taken, and he carefully looked around, trying to gain some feel for navigational cues. But they didn’t seem to have gained any distance, even after a hundred thousand long patient steps. Suddenly Barry announced his hunger, causing a great droplet of Precambrian pond water to appear. While the other two ate their little meals, the microbe swam back and forth inside that bacteria-rich treat.

“What’s wrong with me, Sandra?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know quite a bit more than I know,” Kelvin complained. “I can’t figure out what direction we’re heading, or even find a single usable landmark. What you tell me about this birthday party feels true, but that could mean that I’m highly suggestible, nothing more.”

His companion bent her head down, tearing the raw meat from a chunk of white bone.

“I feel like I’m broken,” he whispered. “Compared to you, at least.”

Kelvin fully expected her to gloat.

But instead the little T. rex brushed her tail against his leg, the gesture apparently meant to reassure. Then with a sober tone, she mentioned, “We aren’t expensive items, I’m afraid. Manufactured quickly and with no eye for details.”

“I’m what? Just a trinket?”

A sympathetic look filled her face. “Perhaps you came out of the factory wearing a few more flaws than usual. Perhaps.”

“But look at what’s right about me,” he said. “And look at yourself. Both of us have good strong minds. I’m full of guts and lungs that work, and a heart, and other important things.” He came close to mentioning his male organ, but balked. “I’m also holding memories of some life that seems real and rich to me. And when I sleep, I dream about my prehistoric existence.”

“I dream in the same ways,” she confided.

“And we’re just cheap pieces of crap? Is that reasonable?”

“In a future where miracles are ordinary, it is reasonable. And more importantly, it is inevitable. Why shouldn’t the humblest toys have souls and dreams?”

“Because that would be cruel.”

Sandra had nothing to offer. She glanced at the shape that was Barry, watching him swim furiously inside that rich, green, blimp-sized wealth of water.

Finally Kelvin asked, “What do you know about the prince? What kind of creature is it?”

“A sentient plasmoid,” she said softly.

“And what’s that?”

She squinted. “At this moment, the plasmoids are the undisputed rulers of our home world.”

“And exactly how old is our birthday boy?”

She hesitated.

Kelvin guessed, “He must be huge, and he’s very old. By our pedestrian standards, I mean.”

“Why do you assume that?”

“Just look around,” he argued. “This room, whatever it is… it dwarfs everything that I can remember, and there’s such a powerful sense of the ages here…”

With a careful tone, she said, “No.”

Then she touched him with the two claws of a hand, gently explaining, “The plasmoid is smaller than any bacterium, as it happens. And this huge home is not much larger than a dinosaur’s heart. And when you think about turning fifty, think tiny bites of time. Imagine fifty one-millionths of a second, and you won’t be too far from the mark.”

Kelvin carefully held her little hand.

“And we are fifty party favors,” she concluded, “waiting patiently to be found by our prince.”

* * * *

They walked again. Apparently there were vibrations and a dim but worthwhile odor that could be followed. But then Barry couldn’t sense any presence besides the three of them, and Sandra had lost any scent worth a deep breath. What would be best, they decided, was to stop for now, to rest and wait until someone else happened along.

Kelvin fell into a deep, dreamy sleep.

He woke on the narrow hard bed in his dorm room, looking out the window at the sun as it passed behind high cottony clouds. With a groan, he sat up. Then he dressed and paused before the room’s little mirror, considering the problem of what was real and what was madness. Even when he knew the truth, he couldn’t escape his day. He found himself walking to lunch and to class and back to his room to wash and change before heading out to dinner; and then with the evening, there was some very hard drinking.

Events swept him along to the karaoke bar where his crotch got drenched by the spilled drink. Could he dry himself in time? It was a game among his drunken friends, everybody handing him napkins and coarse suggestions. Kelvin was beginning to make progress with the mess. Then the master of ceremonies strode up on stage to announce the next victim.

“Is it me?” Kelvin groaned.

But it wasn’t his turn, no. The next song was the love ballad from a Twentieth Century movie that nobody had heard of, and the young woman performing it happened to be named Sandra.

Kelvin couldn’t stop his frantic cleaning of his jeans. But he had the power to look up, to watch the very pretty red-haired woman with little hands and a prominent, perfect rear end.

Sandra had a beautiful voice.

A professional voice.

By the end of the song, everybody was listening. Applause erupted, and the audience leaped to its feet. Even Kelvin stood. But as he clapped and cheered, he carefully looked around the entire room.

Including Sandra and himself, fifty celebrants were visible.

Of course.

* * * *

Barry was gone.

Sandra woke Kelvin with the sorry news. He had slipped away while they slept, she reported, and then she threw some hard curses at their onetime companion. “I knew he would leave us. I knew it.”

“How could you?”

“Because he prefers to be alone. Didn’t you see that in his nature?”

Not particularly. But Kelvin shrugged agreeably, asking, “So what do we do now? Chase after him?”

“Forget him,” was her advice.

Kelvin was glad to have company, and he said as much.

Sandra absorbed the news with a faint, hopeful smile. “Let’s try this direction next,” she decided.

They marched along what seemed to be a straight line.

“So was I ever real?” Kelvin wondered aloud.

His companion seemed ready for the question. “You’re asking if there was a genuine Kelvin who had a father and attended classes and drank alcohol on the night of his birthday?”

“A model to base me on, maybe.”

“There might well have been,” she allowed. “Who knows what kinds of databases survive from those times?”

The random columns, so tall and perfect, had all at once formed a distinct pattern. For the first time, Kelvin had the strong impression that he had stood on this ground before.

“And what about you?” he asked.

Those nonsensical lips pulled in tight to the mouth.

No, there wouldn’t be databases for dinosaurs. She was something dreamed up from scratch, and it plainly bothered her.

Kelvin changed topics. “So what does our sentient plasmoid look like? If we saw our creator up close, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” she allowed. “Theresa claimed that it’s a cold purple flame, and when it appears, everything else vanishes.”

“And it’s looking for us now?”

She gave a nod, her mouth becoming even grimmer.

Kelvin glanced back over his shoulder, thinking hard with his cheaply rendered mind. Then with a low voice he asked, “Sandra? Do you know one of the traits shared by every cheap trinket and do-dad?”

She had no clue how to answer him. She was a dinosaur and had never owned anything in any life.

But then he made himself tell her, “Never mind.” Kelvin didn’t want to be cruel. He didn’t want to be the one to explain how everything shoddy usually ends up lost and forgotten. But knowing that could be their fate gave him an unexpected strength, and with the strength came a fresh, reassuring sense of freedom.

* * * *

In the end, Kelvin had tied a spare shirt around his waist and bravely stepped up onto the raised platform. From a list of several thousand popular songs, he chose one about luck being a lady tonight. Maybe it was the liquor, or maybe the contrived nature of the moment. Either way, he discovered a rich deep voice and the courage to belt out the lyrics to the increasing approval of the forty-nine in his audience.

Holding the community microphone to his mouth, he could smell the perfume that Sandra was wearing.

Later, in the midst of a congratulatory march around the room, he spotted the girl sitting alone at the bar. Approaching her seemed entirely natural.

Without a shred of doubt, he told her that her singing was beautiful and so was she. That brought laughter and a measure of suspicion. Then Kelvin asked if the stool beside her was taken, and she gestured with her small, long-nailed hand, offering it to him while admitting, “There was somebody else, but he’s gone now.”

Above the din of bad music, they tried to converse.

Later they went outside to find quiet and a little privacy. She seemed sweet and drunk but not sloppy or out-of-control. More than once, she told Kelvin she seemed to know him from somewhere, and wasn’t that peculiar?

Eventually they found their way to the front seat of her car.

And later, the back seat.

Kelvin woke with a start. He didn’t want to leave the dream. It felt rude to have slipped away from his new love. But try as he might, he couldn’t force himself back to sleep. He went as far as covering his head with a spare shirt and one arm, eyes closed as his mind replayed every tiny detail of what probably had never been real in the first place.

Slowly, he realized that a noise was keeping him from sleeping.

A scratching sound, abrasive and obsessive.

Kelvin finally threw off the shirt and sat up, startled to find his dinosaur companion dragging her feet across an unexpected mound of dirt. Sandra smiled as she worked. But where had the dirt come from? From the same place that platypuses came from, he realized. And for some reason she had to shape it into a rough bowl before suddenly hunkering down and looking hard at him, the smile saying everything.

With an effortless ease, the first egg emerged.

Ten more eggs followed first, and all the while the happy father danced around the nest, singing the one song that he knew by heart.