The Dinosaur Thief

I promised you more fiction, so here is "The Dinosaur Thief", a very short story I submitted for an earlier assignment. It's one I'm more proud of than most of the flash fiction I've produced. Perhaps that's because it involved some of the most rigorous editing I can remember so that I could meet the word count set within the assignment, without losing the essence of the story. But while it's a concept I was keen to develop into a larger story, sometimes all you need is a snapshot of that story, and that's exactly what flash fiction is all about.

The Dinosaur Thief 

‘Well,’ Mrs Plumb said, ‘a big thanks to Timmy for bringing in his frog, but the annual bring-your-pet-to-school-day is next Monday.’

Oh no! Harley Brundle thought, remembering the same day last year when Susie Slain brought in her poodle, Nancy, who bit Harley’s hand viciously, drawing lots of blood.

‘My turn!’ Susie snapped as she raced to the front of the class. After fifteen minutes of talking about her visit to the Natural History Museum with her “quite rich” father, she bowed, forcing an applause from the class with her threatening scowl. Then she returned to her seat, but not before kicking Harley in the foot on the way.

‘Ow!’

‘Of course you can go now, Harley!’ Mrs Plumb said.

Harley usually hated standing in front of the class, mainly because of Susie, but today she didn’t mind too much. 

‘I’m not really supposed to tell anyone,’ she began, ‘but this weekend, my Dad and I visited the Brecon Beacons in our special camper van. Oh, but it wasn’t the Brecon Beacons as you know it today. No, it was actually sixty-five million years ago!’

The class sighed.

'It’s true!’ Harley nodded. ‘Herds of dinosaurs roamed in sun-baked valleys, and there was a great big volcano on the horizon! One dinosaur even followed us back: a young T.Rex, we think!’

Suddenly, Susie stood up and shouted, ‘She’s just jealous because I visited the museum and took a real dinosaur bone home with me! She’s always making up these pathetic fantasies because her dad can’t afford to take her anywhere! He’s a loser who can’t even invent a paper aeroplane!'

'You stole a dinosaur bone from the museum?’ Mrs Plumb said, completely aghast.

The class started teasing Harley, telling her she should bring her dinosaur in on pet day and prove once and for all that she didn’t tell “tall tales.”

‘I can’t bring a dinosaur to school,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘It’s far too dangerous.’

‘She’s right,’ Susie said, smiling wickedly. ‘The only meat-eater you’ll see here next Monday is Nancy. And I’ll see you at lunch, Brundle.’

After school, Harley was nursing a swollen eye with a bag of frozen peas in the kitchen when her father popped up from behind the counter, wearing a strange helmet covered in flashing lights and gizmos. 

‘What happened?’ he said, rushing over to her.

‘P.E.,’ she said. ‘How’s Rex?’

‘Well,’ he said nervously, ‘he almost escaped twice, nearly ate the neighbour’s rottweiler and my hand. I wonder how he’d feel about a collar and a muzzle…’

Suddenly, Harley’s other eye was wide with excitement. Through the window, she looked out into the garden, where there sat a kennel big enough for a horse. Inside was dark, but behind a grid of metal bars she saw two large yellow eyes glistening in the late afternoon sun. And on the ground, the tip of a thick, scaly green tail was curled around one of the bars.

‘I wonder how he feels about poodles,’ she said, smiling.