WiP meme!
-1-
Danny stopped in the doorway, looking at the bed. "Oh dear. That's a bit dinky."
"Compared to that hobby acreage you call a bed, yes. Be glad it's not the one I had when I was little."
Danny developed a picture or two in his mental darkroom. "It were shaped like a police car," he said.
"How did -- did Mum tell you that?" Nicholas had a suspicion that Mum and Danny were e-mail buddies.
"I'm a trained investigator, ain't I? It were an inductive deduction based on objective evidence."
"You mean a lucky guess."
"Tomayto, tomahto..."
"It had a little blue and white nightlight."
"Oh, sweet!"
"And the bottom slid out so I could stow my police gear in it. Also socks."
"Hee!"
"What about you?"
"Regular bed. Cowboys on the duvet. Me an' Dad made a wigwam in the corner of the room."
Nicholas was impressed. "Really? That's fantastic."
"Yeah. He really was a good dad. Til he started in with the murdering."
"I know." And he did. Nothing more to be said, really.
Danny looked at the wall. "Didn't you mind him starin' at you?"
"What, your Dad?"
"Kermit the Frog." The walls were done in vintage, Kermit-patterned paper that offended the eye as only genuine Seventies décor could. "Fucker is green."
"It was less terrifying in 1979."
-2-
The enormously corpulent intellectual property lawyer looked on in horror, numbed and paralyzed by the frilled lizards' venom. The pack moved in, hissing, and he felt his bladder and bowels let go -- for the last time. The lizards, maddened by the scent of shit and piss, closed in.
"This place was supposed to be safe!" he screamed in his mind, because he couldn't scream with his mouth, which wasn't working because of the venom I mentioned earlier. "They said this place would be safe!"
He could only watch as the lizards ate his flesh in tiny, bloody bites, like starving Lhasa Apsos consuming a little old lady who'd died the previous day.
"This place was supposed to be safe!" But his last realisation on this Earth was that something was terribly wrong on Reconstituted Dinosaur Island. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.
-3-
Sometimes Irene Butterman stands at the edge of Sandford Gorge. She doesn't ponder her own death often, not these days. Her last living thought had been, Well, *this* is a damned silly thing to do, pardon my French, and she still can't argue with it. But dead or alive, she's always liked the view.