She loves dinosaurs in a visceral way, inexplicable, grown woman playing with bright plastic toys, pint-sized dinos that bring her joy despite all of the greed and violence and pain in her newsfeed, even though she couldn’t identify more than a few: brontosaurus, triceratops, of course T-Rex, and those smaller guys (what are they?) tiny tyrannosaurs hunting in packs, darting through the Jurassic, weaving around ten-foot ferns on razor-toed feet while barking out intel—I’m here, slow down, it’s over there—only they understand, and together they bring down a beast many times their own size, maybe even as big as the one in the palm of her hand, Accountability Dino she calls him, the desk brontosaurus, head cocked atop the long grey sway of his neck, as if to ask Have you done enough work to please them today? but this time she googles the hump on his head and finds out he’s more like a brachiosaurus with a bronto’s tail, a mutt she mutters, and he pulls that dissatisfied look that says That won’t get them off your back, or your front for that matter, and she puts him back down and says okay, I just need to look up one more thing, and once she finds it she knows what to call herself, what to call all of her kind, keen-eyed and hungry, aching to run together and slash at the patriarchs, bringing the whole thing down.
Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. She teaches flash fiction and speculative fiction, and is the author of a novel, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in September 2024. Find out more at www.taracampbell.com
'Velociraptor' was first published at Wigleaf in December 2020; an audio version appeared at Micro Podcast in March 2022.
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