It’s Still There

Maybe I was twenty-one or so, somewhere around there, young anyway, and I don’t remember much about where this all took place, but our teacher sat on his desk and read us the magnificent one-sentence story “The Dinosaur” by Augusto Montessero of Guatemala, which goes: “When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.”

We all thought it was the best one sentence story we had ever read, not that we had read so many great one sentence stories. One of our classmates, a lifelong misanthrope, thought it would be better if the sentence read “When the dinosaur awoke, the man was still there.”

The teacher gave him a dull little smile, then told us he wanted us to use the reporter’s questions to flush out the story. At first, to give us the idea, he asked: Who, for instance, was the man? Did he have a name? What did he look like? Then we all chimed in, calling out from our circle of chairs: Was he hairy? Did he have a scar on his face? Did he carry a spear? Was there a mate waiting for him to bring home the meat? Has he been thrown out of the tribe? Was he some sort of loser?

What kind of a dinosaur was it? Was it green or brown? Did it have a hump? A bad leg? Did it get along with its fellow dinosaurs? Was it lonely? 

Why hasn’t the dinosaur already eaten the man? Are they friends? Is it like a one-time deal or do they always hang out together?

Where was this taking place? Were there some hills around, a swamp, or maybe some lava flowing in the background? Yes, for sure, lava. Lava was cool. A story can always use some lava. Right, more lava.

Okay, our teacher said, maybe don’t get too caught up in the lava.

When is this happening? Are the dinosaurs about to die off? An asteroid about to hit?  End of the world? A new age coming?

How did this all come about, this man, this dinosaur, this moment in time?

So we went off to do our scribblings, the thirteen or so of us, seven guys and six girls, and there isn’t much to say about us except that we were mostly drunks and louts with artistic but criminal dispositions.

The next week we brought our stories back with all the who’s and what’s and where’s and when’s, and we read them, one by one, and we chuckled at our attempts to destroy the story, but we all agreed, unanimously except for one holdout, our misanthrope, that the original was far superior to our laborious efforts and that “The Dinosaur” still stood tall and would remain for all time a perfect one sentence story.

Our teacher sat on his desk, his dark trousers not quite long enough to cover his frayed but clean white socks. He sighed and said, yes, yes, you’re right. It was perfect before. It always will be.

In that moment, with his frayed socks and thin ankles, he looked more tired and old than I had noticed before, and I realized that we knew almost nothing about who he was or where he had come from, or when or why he had started teaching. Was he married? Did he have children? What did he do on the weekends? Did he sing in the shower? Did he ever get drunk? Had he ever wanted to do something else with his life? But it came to me that maybe it was better if we didn’t know. He was just our teacher.

So we, my friends and I with our artistic and criminal dispositions, set out to write the perfect one sentence story, occasionally, just maybe if we were feeling particularly effusive, knocking out a whole paragraph, though our classmate, the misanthrope, went mad writing anti-social haikus that insisted on using the wrong number of syllables. 

All in all, it’s been a miserable life. We break laws with abandon, live in and out of jails, lie down in mud and squalor, and when we open our eyes, the dinosaur is, of course, still there.