The Dinosaurs

(The Last Day of the Cretaceous Period)

The dinosaurs were singing their voiceless songs, clacking their bills and shaking their armored backs. There was always a good deal of this mechanical clatter going on in the Cretaceous, so constant that it became like leaves rustling, the clashing of pine trunks in forests, the smacks and babbles of water. It was always just background noise. Nobody ever really said anything and nobody ever paid attention. I think I heard a distant cracking sound, but what’s a crack amidst a clamor? I may have only imagined that so-soft and so-short whistle that may have followed.

I am absolutely sure that there were several long seconds of silence. Then there was a roar and it was hell rising up beneath us. We were carried upward for miles as the ground shoved its way past the ferns, past the hills, past the pterodactyls, past the dirty little birds, into the sky. Someday these swells would be mountains, but now they were the ground shaking, the earth thrusting, the sky running into us. Now they were the aftershocks of a huge trauma to the entire world. I died in a ripple of a splash. A meteor had smashed into the other side of our little, crowded rock.

I died as the new mountains rose and toppled all of the old world’s grandiose spires. Many millennia's worth of weathering had carved the ancient mountains into strange bent shapes, and it was beneath these wickedly-wrought and most ancient of spears that I was crushed in the first minutes of the chaos.

We all met again as shades in the underworld. First to come were the herbivorous masses in the hemisphere of impact. Most of them arrived without understanding anything. Almost everyone on that side was asleep when it happened, but a few predators saw a flash before the great curtains of smoke fell upon them and they choked. A few tiny bug-eaters and mammals recalled a bright rock in the sky. In spite of the armor and their bulk, the sleeping herds themselves remembered only blinding light, breathlessness, and burning alive layer by layer, like the sun had come to land and it was gnawing them into shreds. The others in the opposite hemisphere remembered being crushed and melted into hot stone. Very few from either side remembered much more than their own deaths, for dying was the only matter pressing enough at any moment to have torn them from making clamor. No one had ever felt the need to pay attention to anything much else. But as ghosts, we had nothing else to do but piece together these disparate moments of death.

Over the weeks and years and centuries we came to understand our world’s end. It took no more than a few weeks for the last of the giants to arrive, and a mere matter of months for the remaining carnivores to fade away, but several generations of the egg-thieves lived short, tortured lives for the next thirty thousand years or more. Through these drawn out conversations, terra firma was finally revealed to us as little more than a fluid metal ball floating in a swarm of other little balls of metal, gas, and ice. When the alien rock hit, our planet recoiled from the shock, like gel, and shook, sending out waves that quickly circled the planet. When these shockwaves encountered each other in my hemisphere, they exploded. The planet’s angry iron core burst outward in spires of molten metal death. Through these newly torn abscesses, our world cast away the most deeply embedded bits of extraterrestrial stone.

And all this is what we dinosaurs discussed for millions of years in the underworld caves. I see it all in my dreams, but in no arrangement: an endless automatic collage, getting pasted together every night from the memories of my brothers and sisters.