A Sunday Night Bedtime Story

Once upon a time after the big mean T-Rex had eaten his last wildebeest of the day and wiped his grimy mouth with the back of his leathery scaly foot, he set off down the damp path through the dense forest with its hanging vines and screeching monkeys.

He was full, stuffed to the brim with wildebeests who ran so slow, catching them was no harder than rolling over and opening his massive jaw. They seemed to fall right in, one after the other. It was so effortless, T-Rex had almost no way to burn any calories. And he was so, so plump. Soft, with love handles for a hundred loving hands, had there been any. Loving hands that is. He was too fearsome to touch, don’t you know. So nobody did. Even loyal Junior Woodchuck kept his distance these days.

In the distance, the wildebeests were gathered and murmuring as they did day and night forever. When they moved, it was as a buzz field. Not one of them had ever seen a line, one thing follow another, sequential patterns not their forte. This left them vulnerable to more linear thinkers. Like T-Rex.

In the darkness that was only the jungle’s, where even the very green things were black in the dead of night, T-Rex stopped to sleep and digest the animals crowding his belly. He admitted to himself that he may have overdone, it was so hard to push away from a bountiful table. But now, he honestly felt that he might burst.

And he did. The bursting was gargantuan and astonishing as wildebeest after wildebeest came shooting out of T-Rex’s shrinking body, each landing on their feet just yards away and standing as they were wont to do in a growing buzz field in the dark jungle. The murmuring started right away. Their puzzlement, confusion, and growing delight.

Did the T-Rex bursting mean that the T-Rex was done for?

Now lit by fireflies that had zoomed in from summer in Iowa to spotlight his amazing disgorgement of the wildebeests, T-Rex lie wilted and thin on the ground. The zipper of his T-Rex costume, clotted with the hair of a thousand creatures and the belched remnants of many meals, peeled back to reveal the original Abercrombie & Fitch label and the washing instructions.

Awakening, the creature that had been T-Rex before his wardrobe malfunction so unfortunately betrayed his true identify, crawled out from the folds of his worn out T-Rex costume, flailing his arms and gasping for air. Naked and tiny, no taller than a garden gnome standing watch amongst the tomatoes and pole beans, the creature that was formerly T-Rex tiptoed down the path, quiet as could be, afraid that the wildebeests, suddenly emboldened, might forget who he was.

He couldn’t risk that. So he left the jungle and moved to Venezuela to wait tables and sometimes pick up gigs cleaning the stalls at the horse barn down the street.