Finer Cheeses of the Late Cretaceous

by Rudi Dornemann

Dear Moms and Dads,

I am not about to admit that you were even slightly right, but the second half of the summer is not turning out to be quite as terrible as the first half. The difference? Red Freya, who used to lead the tours, forgot to charge her ionic shield before one of her jumps back to the milking era and got bit by some kind of proto-mosquito, so now she’s got a lump the size of a grapefruit on her leg and I get to herd the tourists around while she sits on my stool in the gift shop and looks out at the gray snow in the dino skeleton garden.

It’s a long day, because the Motaris are cheap, and only pay us by shop-relative time and have all the tours come back right after they leave, even though it takes at least forty minutes to hop from the kollikodon barn to the remote milking traps — some days we don’t actually find one with a repenomamus in the harness until the third or fourth try. And if one of those feathered dinos runs by, forget it — we won’t be back in under an hour. Like every zoo back up in home time doesn’t have dome where you can trip over the things. We’re not supposed to log more than half our time in eras with carnivorous megafauna or the insurance company will raise the rates, but the Mrs. Motari who assigns the tours doesn’t seem worried.

Me, I like being more in a time where everything’s alive and growing than a time where everything’s dead except us in the creamery and the shop, even if it’s alive and dangerous, even if I know it won’t last, at least not in this worldline. I still want to visit one of the no-K/T-extinction lines on my way home, just to see how it all comes out. (And no, Mom2, it’s not because of S’ksth’sks — I mean, he’s sweet, with his big eyes and the way his crest is always ruffled in the morning, but he can be sarcastic, too, and if I go to his line, I’ll have to spend some time with his hatch-mates, and there’s twenty-five of them, so I’ll be totally outnumbered, and I don’t think any of them have travelled off-line or have any mammal friends.)

But we can talk about that later. I’ve got to go now — the 3:00 group is getting bored with the way the kollikos bump around in their pens — or maybe they’ve notice that special giant platypus reek.

XOXOXO

Cicely9B

A Lamu Story

by JeremyT

Once, in Lamu, a small island off the coast of Kenya, I stopped for lunch in a small restaurant near the center of the island. The place was empty, except for a stern looking Islamic man with a grey-streaked beard who I took to be the proprietor. I took a seat, and he joined me in at my table and smiled. “I would like to tell you a story,” he said.

“That would be nice, thank you,” I said. It is not often that strangers approach you and offer such a thing. I was curious.

“When I was a boy, I traveled to a neighboring island as part of a football team. We sailed in three dhows down the coast, for three days. It was a big deal then, to go so far from home. I had never left our island before.”

“On the second night, we beached our boats on a tiny island, not much bigger than my shop, and built a campfire from driftwood. We slept under the stars, and talked about the victory we were sure to have when we arrived the next day.”

“I was the last one awake. The ocean was calm, so when I heard splashing, I knew it wasn’t just waves. I searched for the sound. In the starlight, I could just make out the shape of some thing, large as a man, heaving itself out of the water and onto the beach.”

‘Its shape was like no shape I’ve ever seen. It had eyes in places where eyes should not be. And the breeze brought its smell to me; like a rotting corpse. Yet it moved, like a living thing, towards our camp.”

‘I could not scream, or shout at the sight of it. It paralyzed me. Do you know what happened next?” He smiled at me again, but this time, the smile did not look friendly at all.

“What are you doing here again?” suddenly shouted a young man, beardless, from the door of the kitchen. Before I could utter a word, the old man was up from the table and darting out into the hot street, laughing madly. The young man apologized to me for taking so long in the kitchen, and asked what I would like to have. I had forgotten to read the menu.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“A mad man,” was all he would say on the subject. “A very sick person.” He pretended not to understand any of my further questions. I searched the island for the remainder of my stay, looking for the old man. I needed to hear how his story ended. I never found him. I was left to imagine how such a strange story would end. What troubles me is, have I imagined something worse, or less so, than the truth?