Smilodon

This story first appeared in All Hallows 40, edited by Barbara Roden

The day is over. The children and their parents have gone home, the cleaners have come by with their rags and spray bottles, wiping away smears. The mouse that lives under the second toe of the left hind foot of the Triceratops has been by for a visit. He likes to stop and shrill at me, daring me to come out.

My case is tucked into an odd corner of the museum. My bones are pieced together with glue and bits of wire — a clumsy parody of my living self. I'm just another bit of debris from the ancient past, put on display to be gaped at by tired parents and bored children. Sulky little brats, runny noses pressed against the case, grubby hands leaving smudges. Standing so close I can almost feel the beating of their sweet young hearts.

"Kittycat," they say, their breath warm and misty on the glass.

Light snack I think. Step closer, my succulent little one, and call me that again.

Wishful thinking. Young as they are, they know better than to fear a pile of old bones. An incomplete pile at that.

"He’s lost a tooth," they say, and their parents chuckle and make jokes about flossing.

Morons. I didn’t lose anything. My tooth was torn from my head when I buried it, along with its fellow, in the belly of a mastodon. I locked my jaws and whipped my head down to tear her belly open; my left tooth caught under a rib. She thrashed and flailed, and I felt a searing heat in my jaw as an essential piece of myself was ripped away. She tore free with a bellow of pain and started to run, but she didn’t get far. One tooth was still enough to tear her heart out, and the throbbing pain in my jaw didn’t stop me from eating.

That might have been the end of me. The world was young and hungry then, and an animal that was hurt soon became an animal that was dead. But I lived. I had to hunt twice as hard, and I ate more old meat than young, but I lived and thrived and was a scourge to the other animals of the plains for a long, long time. When I died it was as a carnivore should die, old and feared.

The land buried me deeply and with infinite patience. The young world grew old, running itself in circles around the sun. I slept, and dreamt the rich smell of blood and the good taste of meat, and the hunt, and the sound that the prey made in the last moment of its life. The dreaming of it was almost as good as the living.

Then came the digging man. Chipping me from my place bone by bone with an infinite patience of his own. As he worked, excitement dripped from his pores, trickling down through greedy dry red earth into my bones, waking me from my dreams. He plucked up my surviving long tooth and held it high, a trophy of his hunt.

"Smilodon," he cried.

Little man. I ate your ancestors. I crunched their chattering skulls between my teeth. Now I'm here, a brittle remnant of my former mighty self. Not even the main attraction. The brats smear the glass, then pull their parents sleeves.

"We want to see the T-rex" they whine.

The T-rex. What a joke. An overgrown chicken with a brain the size of a pea and more teeth than any real predator should need. Don’t get me started on those useless front arms. Still, he’s the big draw here, while I’m just a stop along the way. No accounting for taste in the modern world.

But sometimes, when the museum quiets down, and the mouse has left off his taunting, I still dream. I dream myself out of this glass box, onto the streets of the sleeping city. Then I am as I was when the world was young, when there was blood in my veins, and blood in my mouth. I am on the hunt again. I pad past the buildings and smell the people inside, and wonder what kind of sounds they would make as I ate them. And as my dream self passes by, kittycats sit up a little straighter, mice weep, and children stir, uneasily, in their sleep.

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