A Prehistoric Heist Story

Smuggling the dinosaur out inside my bag, she cooed or sang or made a noise the animals once made. And now we’ve become characters in stories we’ll never read from future history books. This first night, I wake myself with my snoring, and this creature makes a roar sound, too—so loud for something so extinct. Her nudging into my neck must be her way to keep from disappearing. Or is it to keep me from doing the same? I’ll hide my past like she’s hiding hers and we’ll evolve from the start, branch out into whatever we’ll become. I’ll have time to wait for her to speak. But here she simply cries in code for her mother whom she might think by now is me. And I can play the role—anything she hopes I should be. I’ll raise the dead one-by-one, live again until we don’t, and they’ll find our fossils side-by-side. How cute, they’ll say. We trade breaths while we can, inhale when the other exhales, lose ourselves in the mystery of another. Eons will pass in our dark—time expanding then collapsing like a chest rising then falling, rising then falling. In the silences between, we snuggle a little harder, slip in and out of existence, and listen for some asteroid coming for us both.