Jurassic Jerks: The Life and Times of Dr. Alan Grant

by Mike Itaya

(After Jurassic Park)

 

 

Day 1: Bad Day at Badlands

Snakewater, Montana. I have poisoned the Velociraptor dig. I’ve been exposed as a paleontological fraud. Ellie left with Hammond in his helicopter – with Hammond’s hand in her lap. The graduate interns (even Hannalore, the well-hootered townie) hot-wired the department van and boogied. These are the things they took: hard booze, my pet weasel, Evinrude, two bushels of Yukon Gold Potatoes, and my self-respect.

 

Day 2: Leftovers

A catalog of what remained: Ellie’s horrific homemade sorghum sundries. One case of non-alcoholic beer. A scattergun for the coyotes. A fuckton of regret.

 

Day 6: Cookie Monster

I ate all of Ellie’s cookies and barricaded myself inside the shithouse, where someone had written “Alan Grant is a Jurassic Jerk” on the wall. Weeks before, there was a dartboard of my face in the staff lounge. I’d pay a lot of money to never see that face again.

 

Day 8: Because Reasons

Dr. Sattler left because there was – quote – “no future here with me.”

 

Day 9: Dick’s Donuts

I walk to Rattlesnake Lake. To my unluck, no venomous snake bites me. In town, everything is closed except for Dick’s Donuts. I have a hankering for donut holes. The drive-thru is open, but they refuse to serve me because I am not in a car.

 

Day 12: Velociraptor

“A man destined to change the face of paleontology.” That’s what they once said about me. I remember the day I “found” the female Velociraptor – the radius and ulna and femur. Without a discovery, Hammond would have withdrawn his money. Ellie and I would’ve retreated to our separate research facilities. The dig would be finished. So would our life together.

 

Day 14: Scrambler

In Ellie’s absence, I find a fiefdom of rats nestled in a derelict pair of her undies. “Time to get scrambled,” I say, and blast them with my scattergun.

 

Day 16: Still Here

I woke next to a spent campfire. I was alive. It was a shame I lived with to that day.

 

Day 17: Dear Alan

Half-crazed with horniness, I fell into the site of our dig. I’ve consumed enough non-alcoholic beer to kill a lesser man. I was alone save for the ruin of a thousand scrambled rats. In an act of dwindling bravery, I entered the trailer Ellie and I shared. I felt like a ghost, haunting the rot of my former life. On the bed, there was a note, in which Ellie accounted for her brightening future, the arc of her days without me.

Alan, our unborn son will never know that you didn’t want him – or that I no longer can be with you – because I will never tell him your name.

Back on the day I staged the Velociraptor skeleton, I remember the way Ellie looked, the way that Ellie looked at me. Her face softened, and the mapped worries – about funding, our relationship, our standing in the world – smoothed behind the hazy light of morning which I then mistook for luck.

 

 

 

Mike Itaya lives in southern Alabama, where he works in a library. His work appears in New Orleans Review, BULL, and The Offing. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University.

 

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