Dinosaurs On The Brain

Dinosaurs on the Brain

I have dinosaurs on the brain. That’s a bit silly, isn’t it? But I swear: I’ve dinosaurs on the brain. I can feel their breath, their movement when they pass by. I can hear their rumbling and chirping and crying and howling, feel their knightly armor or exotic feathery-tuft. I can sense their passage; swift and quick or slow and graceful.

At the library, on the way home, at the park, at the restaurant: I have dinosaurs on the brain. I can feel things like the unseen breeze. I watch them amble down packed highways, or stride along crowded beaches. Softball games dont phase them, cookouts neither. Graduations are just another boring shindig for the dinosaurs on their way. Hooting movie theaters dont scare them away either, not one bit.

So here I sit on my front porch under the summer night sky, beneath stars the dinosaurs wouldn’t recognize, in a neighborhood crowded with houses and metal stumps we funnily call cars. The dinosaurs don’t mind. Not at all. Their never-ending August goes on, gorgeous and unreachable, primeval paradise in all its savage, strange, stinging reality.

I’ve dinosaurs on the brain. Really, it’s true.

Canadian dinosaur coins, how awesome!

Lights, Action, and Relaxation

Late night tonight. I watched a lot of movies today, and relaxed, did my usual walk, picked up the house. Still feeling kind of sick, on and off. Tired. But relaxed. Happy. Excited for Mother’s Day, it’ll be really nice to hangout with my mom and my sister, do something enjoyable for my mom. She’s a really great woman. She works very hard for all that she has. I hope everybody had a good day today, whoever reads these, you crazy bastards. I can’t imagine I say anything very interesting, and I’m sorry I kind of ramble.

- your friend, Zachariah

Neighbors in the Rain

It is storming today. Bruised thunderclouds rumble, lit internally by crackling lightning; electric spears.

The man sits in his lawn chair on the patio, overlooking the sheer lawn and slick aphsalt street. Prim houses line both sides of this road. Rain pelts the roof, splashing with metallic noise.

A car drives quietly up the street, it’s electric engine softly humming. It’s the neighbors. More rain patters it’s window and windshield.

The man watches. Sips his coffee.

They’re the neighbors. They are short, maybe five feet tall at the absolute most. Their skin is grey like dull clay, and they are eerily gaunt, thin. Lengthy arms and legs, with hands that end in disturbingly long fingers. Four fingers. Enormous, almond shaped eyes stare out from bulbous heads on thin necks.

Thunder grumbles when the last car door is closed. The man watches as his neighbors disappear inside their small, suburban home.

He sips his coffee. The rain patters on.

Arthur Morgan, and the Rings of Paradise

Arthur was confused.

His mind reeled and his stomach ached like he’d been drowning his insides in putrid liquor. Doubled over, coughing, half laughing at his predicament he remembered lengthy drinking binges with Lenny or John or Javier. He wiped spittle from his chin as the daze began to be replaced by a painfully everpresent dull ache. The outlaw scratched unkempt hair from under his hat, looking this way and that, looking for his horse. Arthur was alone, too, on a familiar lookin grassy plane surrounded by sparse woodland islands. Birds’ egg blue skies embraced him. A gentle breeze whispered here and there.

He whistled in vain, sputtering out into a coughing fit. “Rachael! Oh, goddamn creature, run off again... What the hell did we drink last night..?” Arthur wiped his eyes and very suddenly, something caught his uncertain gaze.

Foggy disorientation vanished from his thoughts in an instant.

The sky above him arched upward into an elegant, impossible Ring growing increasingly thin and tiny against a dreamlike blue-black sky. Before and behind him stretched landscape and horizon as it reached into the air. He saw gorgeous oceans, crimson deserts, steaming jungles, glacially entombed mountains, hissing badlands: all in endless glory above him.

Arthur Morgan fell to his knees in silence, staring upward in disbelief. Thoughts of fireside roars by Dutch about paradise echoed in his mind, stories of rich eternity in an untamed and uninhabited frontier. Arthur Morgan felt tears prickle at his eyes. The weight of his rifle and repeating shotgun and revolvers, his aged knapsack, the weight of running from the law, the weight of fear that had grown in him as dreams of paradise slipped away into unreality: all seemed to evaporate into nothingness. Another life.

Then: a scream in the skies above him. Arthur threw himself to the ground and drew his ornate revolvers, turning upward just in time to watch bulbous, unnatural shapes wrought in organic purplish-black racing overhead. The flying machines were larger than any carriage or steamboat he’d ever seen, and they flew like horrendous angels!

More strange craft like howling demons passed overhead and away from him, thrumming with predatory energy. Suddenly the Outlaw felt very, very small.

When Arthur noticed he was not alone, and when Arthur saw the hulking giant metal man carrying a rifle unlike any he’d ever seen, a singular thought grew in his thoughts.

What the in the goddamn hell did I get myself into?

Primordial Interlopers

The first reports by telephone were an interesting and fairly entertaining joke to both local law enforcement and newspaper offices in the late evening, early morning hours.

“Well.. we didn’t know what to make of it in the slightest”, reports an obviously tired, exasperated Sheriff Elizabeth Cadieux-Andrea.

The Sheriff, a dedicated woman born in the town of Larson and known dedicated community servant was woken in the night roughly around 2:30 a.m., receiving a call from the on station Officer Howard James.

“At first I thought it had to be a joke. Of course it was. I thought, anyway.. I mean, we’ve had crank calls. Calls about a lake monster on the peninsula, stories about ghosts prowling the cemetery. So of course I thought this was a joke—wouldn’t you?”

After a shaky and brief communication with Howard, the Sheriff woke her husband before quickly changing into uniform and stepping out to the surprisingly still muggy air. It must’ve been strange, let alone frustrating: shambling to a police car at ungodly hours of the morning for another ridiculous report beneath seemingly endlessly Milky Way starlight. Mrs. Cadieux-Andrea reports that she was just about to turn at the end of her street heading north before locking eyes with a sight that would forever change her life.

“I thought at first.. I thought a first I was seeing things. You know what I mean—rub your eyes, shake your head. Laugh it off even because it can’t possibly be there. It just can’t. But there it was. Tall as a man with talons and jaws, big as a goddamn lion. Bigger.”

Sheriff Cadieux-Andrea was seeing a dinosaur. My paleontologist contact in the local museum tells me a Ceratosaurus Nasicornis based on a more detailed description the Sheriff would give under oath the following day which described the distinctive nasal horn, small four-fingered hands, and dorsal ridges characteristic of this Jurassic predator. A creature extinct for nearly a hundred million years was striding across a suburban road.

“He just watched me with those eyes. They reflected the most ghastly pale white I’ve ever seen in my life, like wolves in the dark..”

And as quickly as the creature had been sighted, it disappeared quickly into a nearby strand of trees alongside the homes to her right. By the time Cadieux-Andrea had arrived at the police station: nearly two hundred phone calls had been received documenting similar encounters across the entirety of the town.

A local man smoking a cigarette on his front porch watched as a small group of bone-headed herbivorous dinosaurs, Pachycephalosaurus, quickly marched down the road. He noted the animals were seemingly agitated which must’ve been an accurate representation as within moments of being sighted the dinosaurs began to ram into the parked vehicles nearby. The stunned observer told this reporter that the time-stranded creatures did an incredibly bizarre dance between impacting their metallic foes, like jungle birds, and that he could catch glimpses of vivid colors when the dinosaurs briefly stepped under the streetlights.

An young couple (who wished to remain anonymous because of the nature of their rebellious activities) were giddily driving home close to the shores of Lake Rose when, like a primordial fever dream, a massive horn-faced dinosaur (identified as the recently discovered Ultraceratops from a magnificent Deseret fossil bed) crosses the desolate wooded road. The first young woman of the couple said that it was immense: seemingly larger than the elephant from the local zoo, and that in the headlights it’s striking frill was akin to haunting patterns found on moth species. This quote especially sticks with this reporter: “It was like it had a pair of giant, crimson eyes, ringed by black and blue! Like it was starring back at us...!” After what had likely been only a moment or two, the herbivorous titan disappeared back into the forest.

Local celebrity and irritating miscreant of this newspaper (who shall remain nameless to irritate them immensely) spoke to an associate of the Larson Times, quote: “A big bird ate my dog, my poor Princess! It was like—like an eagle big as a jungle cat, with curving claws and black feathers, and it snatched up my poor baby when I let her out! Goddamn monsters! Must be the Soviets, come here to eat and torment the godly, patriotic pets of Americans!” (As of the publishing of this article no connection between the prehistoric arrivals and the United Soviet Socialist Republics has been documented.)

The stories are many, many indeed. And it seems, all in a single night: the mysterious primordial arrivals simply vanished. Searches since Wednesday night have turned up nothing, involving animal specialists and big game hunters and wacky cryptozoologists. Physicists from Moscow, London, and Chicago have arrived, all speculating endlessly on this fantastical scientific curiosity. We hope to publish more citizen accounts in the coming days as the interview process continues. In the meantime: watch out for dinosaurs.

- published in the Larson Times, 1///, prior to the Incident at Harper Town.