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Present Day

I DON’T WANT THEM TO go.

I know I will forget them if they leave now.

I think about running down the 86 flights of stairs of the Empire State Building to the street so I can hold up my hands, block their way, scream, “Don’t go!”

But if I do, I’m certain one of them will eat me—probably the T. rex. It’ll lift my body with its furious hands, crunch my bones with its massive jaws, chew my tendons with its sharp incisors.

I can’t stop them: The dinosaurs are leaving New York City.

Hundreds and hundreds of them in all shapes and sizes, radiating out from the doors of the American Museum of Natural History, walking into the Holland Tunnel, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, wading through the Hudson River.

They are in groups and alone:

A family of triceratops, the mother nudging a young one with her nose, an impatient stomp of her front foot.

A T. rex angrily swiping its tiny arms at abandoned cars.

A pterodactyl swooping down Broadway.

I watch them from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, popping quarters into the tourist telescope so I can see them up close: the beautiful metallic green-gray glint of scales, the way their chests heave oxygen in and out, the casually powerful swat of a tail.

They take my breath away.

They bump cars and break windows.

Eph was right.

For a second, I wonder if I should tell my dad that the dinosaurs are leaving. But I can’t move, and even though there’s no way all those dinosaurs could come from one building, it makes perfect sense to me, and I know then that I’m dreaming.

I still don’t wake up.

They’re endless and unstoppable, piling up in awkward clumps, spilling against the museum doors in waves, pushing past one another, roaring ferociously, wings beating heavily in the air.

Some of them have luggage strapped around their middles—suitcases piled up in precariously wobbling towers. Others are beasts and beasts only, snarling at one another, at the cloudless sky.

A brontosaurus ducks its long neck, trying not to get caught in telephone cables.

A brachiosaurus splashes into the river, its head bobbing well above the water line.

A giganotosaurus ducks to fit into the Holland Tunnel, scrunching its head down.

They are caravanning on highways away from the city. They leave behind footprints in the melting asphalt, broken-down trees, smashed taxis. Their weight displaces the familiar world: Pylons snap on the Brooklyn Bridge. The Hudson River sloshes past its shoreline. The aforementioned giganotosaurus creates a bottleneck in the Holland Tunnel. (A stegosaurus screams at the delay. )

They fight and growl, plod and stomp, but they are leaving.