A Rough Draft

First off, let's talk about what we're listening to these days. Sadie is a big fan of this particular song, she says, "I like this song" when it starts. She also once thought that it was Ole McDonald, but I think it's safe to say she loves it.



Sometimes we slow it down and listen to the "Lovely Girl" song.



Okay, my first request for writing a short story came in as:
a dinosaur, in the first person, who lives on mars and is conflicted about returning to earth to tell the true story of the dinosaurs demise..
make it a vegetarian dinosaur with a sense of humor
good luck!!

Listen, Calvino has a great story about dinosaurs in Cosmicomics. Everyone should go out and read Italo Calvino after finishing this post, that book in particular, or risk being thought a fool by this author who can't figure out/doesn't are enough to stop writing in highlighted text. I'll give it a shot anyway, but I expect book reports on Calvino. Don't be lazy America, or the small part of America that I know, read a book. 

It is hard to determine, after a certain number of years spent alone, just exactly what you are? For instance, isn't it said that a beetle, for beetles existed in the cretaceous, though that's not what we were calling it. Anyhow, I remember hearing a story about a beetle who became isolated from all other beetles who were currently scurrying about the world and began believing by the mid point in his life that he was a dinosaur and not a beetle. I should point out that his life came to a rather abrupt end mere moments after he decided that he was a probably a dinosaur. Apparently, or so I was told, he began approaching a large herbivore like dinosaur, menacing him with what he believed were large tearing claws, which unfortunately for him turned out to be merely minuscule feet, and, on the approach he accidentally stepped onto a large leaf and was summarily eaten. 

I don't quite remember why I began telling that particular story, one's mind begins to wander as I may or may not have said before. The irritating part about living here is the drab dullness of the place. What appears from far overhead to be large portions of red rock, occasionally broken up by slightly different portions of red rock, actually turns out, from up close, to be exactly that. The strange part is that I don't entirely remember how I got here? I hear someone else saying something, "I know dear friend. How did anyone of us get here? It's a chicken an egg type thing? Do we know what chicken and eggs are? Are you also hungry?" The problem is that I don't know if the voice is to be trusted. He's been telling me for weeks that we need to eat more rocks, but I am honestly quite tired of eating rocks. I mean, I realize it's an adaptation that has served all of us quite well, but it's a disappointment, somewhat on par with what the beetle must have felt as he was slowly being digested in the belly of a large herbivore.

If you're like me you're wondering if it occurred to the beetle as he was being eaten that he wasn't a dinosaur with large flesh shearing claws or whether he said something like, "Holy shi-. I forgot, I'm just a beetle!" I'm hoping for the former, but I've always been an optimist and a bit soft-hearted for whatever it is that I've become. I don't remember a definition for he who mopes about eating rocks and wondering how he got there. I suppose, as the last remaining kind of my species I'm as entitled as anyone to come up with the name. 

Although, to be fair, that's not why I've been asked here today. (Checks notes). Have I been asked here? Is it possible to be asked to something if you're the person who is doing the asking? As you can see I'm in a judge, jury, and executioner type role, although I'd also technically be on trial. The whole exercise is typically mind bending, and I've been told that I have the mind roughly the size of a walnut, which is something that is slightly larger than an average rock, and much more culinarily pleasing, or so I intuit. 

We've had visitors here, you see. The voice and I. The voice kept telling me to rend the flesh from their bones, but sometimes the voice forgets that that's not the sort of way that a person should behave around strangers. 

"What the hell is that?" One of them said. 

"I guess it's a Martian," the other said fearfully, holding something up and pointing it at me. 

"Do we kill it?" 

"Maybe we could try and communicate with it. What are the chances it speaks standard American English?" 

"Somewhere just below zero." 

It was at this point in time that I stopped listening to their thoughts and began to think about rending the flesh from their bones. The problem was that I couldn't exactly remember how one went about rending flesh from bones. Was it a slicing gesture? Did one use one's talons to cut at a forty five degree angle? Was it better to cut straight across? Is that even what rending entailed? The voice was telling me that it was best to cut at a forty five degree angle, though it believed that it wouldn't be a bad idea to operate at ninety degree angles either, and then it gibbered for a while about solving for the third side of a right triangle before falling asleep. 

"I don't want to over extrapolate, but the looks kind of unintelligent just standing there." 

"Did he, not sure why I'm assuming it's a he, just eat a rock?" 

"Is there a chance that it's self-replicating? Have we even considered the possibility that gender is specific to our planet and evolution, but that it's entirely something else--"

"Yeah. I'm pretty sure that thing just ate a rock." 

The voice is always drifting off like that into sleep. I believe that he's often too emotional and I tell him that, but it's hard to make him listen. I've decided not to rend the flesh from their bones on the grounds that I wouldn't even know where to start. I make a friendly gesture with my tail, swinging it round in front of me and they all take a step back. 

"If that sob swings his tail again I'm going to fire on him." 

"He, it, whatever, doesn't seem particularly aggressive." 

"Do you find it strange that we're calling it a male. Is it because we'd be more comfortable killing the thing if it's a man, or is it because we're still living in the grips of a vast patriarchy." 

"I mean functionally, how do you go about getting any sustenance from a rock. It's implausible. Like, I'm wondering if it even exists. Are we all seeing the same thing? or did the ship spring some sort of major gas leak right before we landed." 

I think therefore I am. However, sometimes I don't think. Sometimes I'll be sitting around for hours at a time, just passing time, and I'll try and go back to remember exactly what I was thinking, and I'll use my tail to smack myself in the head because I'll realize that I've been thinking about nothing at all. I don't really understand Cartesian dualism, but I'm fairly certain that the scientists who's brain I was sifting through didn't either. The voice has been waxing on for an hour about the beauties of raw flesh, but I keep telling him we're up a creek without a paddle because those people left a month ago. He has trouble distinguishing time, the voice. It's another one of his problems. Sometimes he'll confuse the Jurassic with the Mesozoic, and I'll just have a little chuckle to myself about his foolishness. 

"I'm thinking that we're not heroes if we bring back a corpse."

"I'm thinking that if we bring back nothing, they'll send someone else out here next time to get him, it, whatever." 

"Does he look like a dinosaur to anyone else. Not everywhere, I'll admit, but kind of around the eyes. Look around the eyes and tell me you're not looking at a dinosaur." 

"I am not looking at a dinosaur. I am looking at a Martian." 

And now I'm waiting for them, or someone like them to return. And I'l have to decide if I want to go back. If I want to describe to them the lengthy winter that came after the Meteor hit. If I want to tell him how it was all we could do to rend and tear at each other's flesh. How in the end, we were all carnivores that winter. How else were we to survive? It's a sad story, that one, and perhaps I'll tell a different one this time around, perhaps I'll say that we grew wings and soared out of the earth's atmosphere and into space beyond, that we adapted on the fly, generation after generation, until we reached Mars, or whatever, and forgot how to fly, how to rend flesh from bones, how to do any of those things that might have once made us emperors of the earth. I can't decide if any of this is true or not. The voice is suggesting to me now that we are only a beetle in the belly of a large herbivore. I suspect that he might have been right about everything all along.