Age of the Dinosaurs

Age of the Dinosaurs

by C.D. Tolliver

Joseph Patel sighed deeply and set aside the latest “We don’t publish fiction” letter. They all read pretty much the same:

“Thank you for your submission, but we don’t publish fiction. A story about a young boy learning to love his grandfather by spending summers making art cars just isn’t convincing and no one read this sort of feel-good Coming of Age drivel anymore.”

He sighed again and looked out the window at the radio-controlled Ford Model T with life-size velociraptors in the front seat, wearing clothes his grandfather had saved from the trip across America he and his brother had made in 1928. They were partying it up with old jugs and bottles that had actually held moonshine during Prohibition.

Joseph smiled, remembering his grandfather’s endless patience as they had made clay models for molds and poured the velociraptors’s heads, arms and paws – each piece separately – and carefully fit them over the articulated robots so they could turn their heads, “drink” from the bottles and wink at the ladies as they drove by. The hours of patience required for this task and the frustration when, almost done, the rats had gotten into the workshop and chewed the feathers off the driver. All the while, his grandfather told him the story of his life and the pranks he played and how he learned everything he knew about anatomy, electronics and dinosaurs from working at a special effects studio.

Joseph learned so much about the weird, quiet man who had raised his mother and his father argued with about everything on every visit. “Weird” he definitely was, but “quiet” was a deceptive description, because he knew so much about so many things and he turned everything into “teaching moments,” without all the moralizing and self-righteousness of his parents.

His writing was too old fashioned, obsolete. Suddenly Joseph laughed out loud as he realized that, at age 15, he had been called a dinosaur. Sitting down, he began a rewrite, this time fiction, with zombies.

Virginia Walters

He dogged my steps, yipping at every comment and sniffing his contempt. The question was do we roll over or lay down and play dead. In the end we tossed them a bone.

Virginia Walters

C.D. Tolliver

Quasi-Combat avec les Animaux

Freddie ducked Jason’s ham-handed blow, chickened out and hared off to the principal’s office. He was dogged by Bertie and Sam, who had been pigging out on Pop-Eye’s while waiting for the fight.

C.D. Tolliver

The Ending

They had all written their endings: sad, a little bitter and very final. But if they had turned the page they would have seen me exit with a smile and a silent ‘yahoo.’

by: Virginia Walters

Understanding Flares by C.D. Tolliver

“Look, a parabola is like a parable, it gets close to what Jesus meant, but never reaches it.”

Joey’s eyes brightened as he made the great leap, “So no one understands conic sections!!!”

Eschatology or Est Scatologie by C.D. Tolliver

It was supposed to be zombies and giant scorpions and dragons and sun-eating wolves.  As it turned out, Fimbulvetr was hot and arid and Mayan jaguars couldn’t for the heat. Ragnarok lacked its super-human mortal gods and no one shouted “She fell! She Fell! Babylon the Great has fallen!” announcing Armageddon as Gehenna overflowed its banks and mephitic vapors poured from Avernus, the birdless place in Italy.

A simple experiment involving the newly discovered Higgs boson, a smattering of tachyons and a cup of really good Earl Grey tea, sans milk and sugar, spelled the end of the planet, or at least Central Europe, which was scooped out of the planet like ice cream on a summer’s day and deposited just this side of Mercury’s orbit.  In three days, Switzerland, the Alps and the beer halls of Munich would become part of the solar furnace, and 8 minutes and 20 seconds later a blast of gamma radiation and x-rays would hit the Arecibo Observatory in Porto Rico and put an end to the SETI project forever.  There may be intelligent extra-terrestrial, but life on Earth would be extinguished by someone saying, “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.” in a poor imitation of the precise diction of Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart.

Who would have guessed that a catastrophic series of events would be triggered by tea, the life’s blood of the TARDIS, spilt in a déjà vu moment mimicking Saturday Night Live’s “Pepsi Syndrome.”  The world ends not with a bang or a whimper, but with a shout of “Oh, shit!”, fried circuit boards, a power surge through the European electrical grid, and the meltdown of two nuclear power plants.

The electromagnetic pulse knocked out all the spy satellites over Eurasia triggering an automatic launch of ICBMs, now lacking guidance systems and targets, into suborbital ballistic arcs.  It was a bright day for Earthlings as the European Union lost the Swiss and nuclear devices, happily unarmed, rained down on population zones, preserving life for another day.

Fireworks by Anonymous

I sat on the crouch dreading his arrival. I plead with God to make everything okay, please let him be in a good mood, please. I steal a glance at the clock, 4 minutes until he's home, the bile rises to my throat. I close my eyes and pray. I open my eyes, take a deep breath and run a quick list through my mind. I made sure all my tasks were done perfectly, exactly the way he likes but he almost always finds something not to his liking and that's when the fireworks hit. Last week I triple checked everything and still I fell short and his fist hit my jaw lightening quick. I jump, as I hear his car door slam. His key is in the front door. My heart is beating so fast I feel as if it will jump out of my chest. He opens the front door and stands there with a displeased look on his face. I am scared, I recognize the look and I know the fireworks will begin and my world will swirl into a black abyss.  Oh dear God please help me was my last thought before I hit the floor.