Canadian Dinosaur Coins, How Awesome!

Canadian dinosaur coins, how awesome!

Far and Away, Silence Stretches Forever

The forest is empty, and quiet. Sketched black tree trunks are empty, hollow. Their scorched carcasses painfully thin in the half light. Pale white ash swirls gently in the whispering wind. Silence reverberates in hallowed tones.

The rivers run clear and still as glass. Empty of life. Dark rocks, smoothed pebbles without purpose or design.

Quiet bones litter the forest floor. Shimmering antlers that once glowed like gold. Obsidian dark feathers without color that once shined like flaring midnight. Discarded pelts once as smooth as silk, rich as regal banners.

Nothing remains. Far and away, yawning silence stretches forever.

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.

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.

Beneath

I never thought about what Aunt Lily did in her basement, or why she went down their so often. You’d be surprised what you don’t notice when you’re young and there’s a big sprawling tv screen clear as any window and you’re up in the countryside with ponds to splash in, woods to play in. You don’t notice when the adult your with—especially someone as lovely and kind and fun as Aunt Lily—disappears for several hours at time. You just don’t notice.

Then I got a little older. While now I had a phone, and a game system I could carry in my backpack, I started to get a little.. bored. The pond seemed dinky and tiny. The woods were hot, filled with too many bugs too eager to nip and bite.

And I started to notice Aunt Lily disappearing. I noticed how bare her lovely country home seemed. Few pictures or artworks, just a bit furniture.. It was like Aunt Lily didn’t really do much other than spend time in her basement. And by the time she finished it was only an hour of tv or so with me before she was snoring away.

It’d be always been a kind of unspoken rule between us to not go into the basement. I wasn’t a fussy kid, and didn’t break rules: so why would I just barge down there? Aunt Lily was obviously busy on something, so by right could I go on and barge in, disrupt her? As a kid, the thought seemed impossibly rude, nearly sacrilegious.

Now, things seemed different. I noticed how Aunt Lily had numerous solar panels on the roof and even three churning turbines like odd, white trees on the hillside. I noticed how sometimes the power seemed to fluctuate, oddly. I noticed how far away Lily lived from everything, even in the country; easily a four hour drive, two of which seemed only dirt roads deep in redwood country..

By the time I was eighteen and spending a last summer there before college; I couldn’t contain my curiosity.

What the fuck was Aunt Lily doing down there?

One night she went to bed. Tired as always after our of tv and some supper, she kissed my cheek and ruffled my hair before climbing the steps. As soon as I heard her door close my heart began to race. My skin tingled. Thoughts raced. I waited fifteen, twenty minutes. Just to be sure.

The basement door was colossal, and heavy. Metal like something out of a laboratory or security room, not a dainty little wood entrance. The stairs went down into a hallway, and onward.

To where?

I descended. Heart thrumming with intensity. The hallway seemed to go on for moments, smoothly carved black rock with soft but discernible lights carved at equal distance. I noticed how strangely tall the ceiling was, how wide the walls were from another. Almost like a hospital..?

I waked for five, ten minutes. It seemed longer.

The room was large. Larger than the entire house above it, easily twice or double that, maybe more. Dark electric blue-black light played over the slick, sterile surfaces. Bulbous machines seemed to line the walls in rows, like twisted glassy-synthetic plants from some otherworldly oasis. Scientifc instruments and mechanisms sprawled along the tables and islands, files in open piles.

What the fuck was she doing down here?

I noticed the hatchery.

A singular, bowl-shaped placement the width and breadth of a dinner table covered by a glass top. Within was a bedding of grass or moss, and a thin fog seemed to trail within.

There were eggs. Easily twenty, thirty eggs. Maybe more. The smallest were seemingly normal chicken-sized eggs, ovular and grey. Then.. there were the others. Eggs thin and lengthy, with leathery coatings, which seemed to softly breathe. Round, ball-shaped eggs with dark splotched coverings in bizarre patterns. Skinny almost tubular eggs tinted a rich, almost creepy bluish purple.

A singular camera or watching device dangled from the glass dome, gently swiveling, ever observant.

Was Aunt Lily some kind of farmer..? A really weird, underground chicken breeder?

When my hand touched the cool glass, a digital printout sprang to life under my fingertips, outlining the egg in a soft virtual outline. Temperature readings, internal diagnostics, likelihood of hatching within a certain timeframe..

But what caught my attention were the species names.

Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Triceratops Horridus.

Allosaurus Fragilis.

They were dinosaurs. And in that moment, I understood.

Mornin’ Entries

Sometimes things can be hard for me. Lately I don’t have many friends and I can get kinda lonely. I don’t want to bother anyone or annoy anyone so I try not to text to much or let them talk to me. I tell them I’ll always be here for them and that’s true, I care for the people in my life, but I’m afraid that if I constantly want to talk to them, they’ll get bored. I talk about a lot of things, I talk a lot in general, I don’t want them to be frustrated with me.

It can be difficult to try and communicate my feelings. On here sometimes I really want to talk to people, I want to get to know them, understand them. I’m intensely curious about so much, about anything and everything, including people and their interests and their ideas. But I can’t do that, you know? I can’t just say “hey, you wanna talk about alien abductions or dinosaur zoos till 3 am? Can I describe in fine detail how I would make a spaceship my home and live comfortably in space? Or what this music makes me feel and the images it gives me in my mind?” Lmao. People would look at me like I had three heads! For a long time in my life I’ve been the odd one out, I guess, which is ironic because I’ve always been the guy everybody knew but only had a select group of friends. Idk. Maybe I’m complaining? I don’t mean to whine. Anyway, good morning everybody, and good day to you all.

- your friend, Zachariah