“That’s part of it.”
He reaches down to the locked cash drawer which I didn’t know was there, and pushes two ten dollar bills across the table toward me, then adds a quarter to the top. Twenty dollars and twenty five cents. He’s got to be fucking kidding me.
“Uh. I had fifty bucks in there, at least.”
“You had forty-seven dollars and thirty two cents, but our account closing fees have reduced your payable balance to twenty dollars and twenty five cents.”
“Holy shit, you’re literally robbing me right to my fucking face.” That time, I do exclaim, because wow. I’m seeing how brazen these fucking banks really are in a way I never thought I’d experience. I used to have a job. I used to have enough money to cover everything and then a little over for extras. Things used to be fine. But it didn’t take much for them to become not fine. Now they’re absolutely completely totally fucked.
“I believe that concludes our business,” he says, acting as if I haven’t said anything at all.
“Dude. You just stole half my money. And you know I don't have much of it.”
He presses a button on the phone on the desk. “Security to the rear, please.”
He’s actually going to get me thrown the fuck out of the bank. Holy shit. This has escalated crazy quickly, and I thought that I was on the edge when I came in here trying to scam them out of three hundred bucks. I came to fuck them, but they fucked back. Hard.
“There’s no need for that. I’m going.”
“Have a nice day, Ms Munroe.”
That’s not my name, but it doesn't matter. In a two minute conversation with a weedy, weaselly bank manager, I lost everything. Unless. I turn around and look back at the shiny, glassy storefront I just vacated. There’s still money in there. Maybe there’s another way to get it out…
“And that’s when I fell into the distant past,” I tell the alien, because that’s basically true.
The alien is frowning as if he is confused. I guess I can’t really blame him. “I understood very little of your story, even though we speak the same language, or at least, we are currently experiencing the illusion that we do.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means reality is slippery, and you can never be entirely certain what is actually happening.”
“This feels like it’s happening.”
“It does. Doesn’t it.” The dinosaur beneath him shifts uneasily and starts to chew, somewhat like a cow chewing its cud. I guess it eats plants. That’s comforting. It is so large if it decided to eat me I would barely be more than a snack.
“Triceratops,” I repeat to myself softly, just because it feels good to actually know something.
“Flungblebungle?” He replies to my word with a word I suspect he just made up.
“That’s what we call those dinosaurs you're riding. Triceratops. Because of those three horns on the, er, top.”
“You have these creatures in your world?”
“Well, we used to. Several million million years ago. They all died out and then little marsupials took over.”
Those documentaries I watch when I run out of new episodes of my favorite television shows are really paying off in spades. I don’t remember all the precise details, but knowing something and then pretending I know lots of things is kind of what I do. It might be what all people do. Except for people who know some things and pretend they know nothing. They’re the worst.
“Anyway, my name is Kristine. What’s your name?”
“I am King Rex, and this is my domain.”
“Oh cool. So you have a whole city? There’s aliens here? This is your world?”
“I inhabit it,” he says. There’s something about the way he says it which makes me think there’s more he’s not saying.
“Just you?”
“Just me.”
And that’s when I realize he is just as stranded here as I am. We’re both adrift sometime in a mutual past. At least, that appears to be what’s happening. As Rex pointed out, things may not be what they seem.
“How did you get here?”
“I was in battle, and at the very moment I was about to destroy my greatest foe, there was a flash of light, and I found myself in a very soft, very warm place. It turned out to be a very large pile of dino…”
“Doodoo.”
“Indeedoo.”
Poop jokes are funny to all species, all places, and all times.
We are both smiling, and that’s when I notice how sharp his fangs are. You don’t really see them until he draws back his upper lip, and then you see how dangerous they look. I suppose all of him is dangerous.
He leaps from his mount’s back, and that's when I realize he is almost twice the size of me. I’m a big girl in my own right, but he makes me feel absolutely tiny.
“Whoa! You’re absolutely huge.”