Dino Land by Will Musgrove

Unlike the park’s main entrance, the door to the break room doesn’t roar. Instead, the rusty hinges sigh like me easing into my La-Z-Boy. I step inside and see manager Julie spreading a Stegosaurus-themed tablecloth across the table where I’ve eaten lunch for the past ten or so years. Streamers wrap around the room like colorful boxing ring ropes. Sitting next to the employee microwave, a dinosaur cake with “Good Luck, Jake” written in icing letters. Candles unlit.

“Go, go,” Julie says, shooing me away with the back of her hand. During lunch, Jake normally goes to his car to phone his girlfriend. I’m in charge of making sure he stops at the break room first. Today is his last day. Next week, he’ll be a Fighting Tiger, a college boy. Rah, rah.

Everyone likes Jake. Even me. He’s a nice guy, and it’s hard to hate a nice guy. Though he is a bit of a know-it-all. Sometimes, when we’re working together, he’ll start rattling off random dinosaur tidbits, “Fun fact, Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptors weren’t around at the same time,” and I want to squeeze his lips together, to tell him to shut up.

At last year’s Christmas party, I got a little too drunk and told Jake how I’d wanted to be a paleontologist growing up. I told him how, when I’d found out paleontology wasn’t like in the movies, like in Jurassic Park, I got a job here at Dino Land to reassess things. The kind of reassessing where you plan to do something but get comfortable doing nothing. The kind where you worry this is it. Jake didn’t laugh, didn’t call me an idiot. He just nodded and said, “Well, those are pretty good movies.” His reassuring tone made me want to punch him in the face.

But I am an idiot. Only an idiot would think paleontology is cloned dinosaurs and action sequences. Only an idiot would chase a delusion. I didn’t want to be a paleontologist. I wanted to be something that never existed.

I spot him standing near the Tri-Slide, a big blue Triceratops with metal slides sloping down from its three horns. Beside him, a crying child. Jake pats the boy’s back and, his head tilted to the side and smiling, gives him one of those I’m-listening faces. The waterworks stop. A man, probably the boy’s father, shakes Jake’s hand as if he’s secured some multi-million-dollar deal. Ha! Last week, a parent threatened to get me fired for not stopping the Spinning-Dactyl ride for her screaming brat. The kid didn’t know that I was doing him a favor, that I envied him. Once you get off the ride, that’s when things get scary.

Approaching Jake, I say, “Julie wants to see you in the break room,” and I almost expect him to place a hand over his heart. You know, the kind of gesture only afforded to those who trust the process, who have everything laid out for them. Not me. I got stuck in the tar pits a long time ago.

On our way back, we pass Terry the T-Rex, teeth bared, facing Barry the Brontosaurus. Two hulking concrete lizards who can never touch, let alone tear each other to shreds. A different kind of extinction. Sometimes I imagine them coming to life and fighting like massive kaiju. Other times I imagine them together in a top-down convertible, the sun warming their scaly skin. On the car’s console, the Holy Grail. Bad guys are chasing them, and they’re about to Thelma & Louise it off a cliff.

In the distance, the roar of the park’s entrance. Every time I hear it, I feel lied to, as if I were shown how things are only to have them tugged out from underneath me like some sort of crappy magic trick. Then I feel dumb for believing in magic in the first place, for believing the T-Rex and Velociraptor ever existed together.

I open the break room door for Jake. Siiiiiiggghhhhh. “Surprise!” everyone shouts. Over 60 million years ago, an asteroid killed all the dinosaurs, blanketed the Earth in ash. Everything froze. Nothing escaped. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Julie yells. I pull my fist out of Jake’s cake. Icing drips off my knuckles and onto the floor, the streamers now thick vines. Jake tries to console me, but I shake him off. I don’t tell him how I wish it were me leaving. I don’t tell him how I’ll actually miss him, how I want everyone to be just as miserable as I am.

I walk outside and hear a plane overhead. Looking up, I watch it fly away to somewhere else and remember Jake telling me that dinosaurs had feathers, not scales, but still most of them couldn’t fly.

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WILL MUSGROVE — Will is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Florida Review, Pinch, The Cincinnati Review, The Forge, Passages North, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Connect on Bluesky at @willmusgrove.bsky.social or at williammusgrove.com.

Art by JAYE FRISINA — When Jaye was little, she would skip school to go to the library, and then go home and draw on the walls. She has a long love affair with ink in all its forms, and often combines words with drawings. Find her at ThirteenthStory.com or @thirteenthstory.bsky.social.