“Can you feel it?! Can you feel the warmth that is the coming of the Lord?” Pastor Cleaver called into his bedazzled microphone.
His “flock” and “lovelies,” as he called them, stood in their pews and stretched out their arms, grabbing at the air.
“Come here, my lovely. Tell me, tell us your pain and how the miracle water has healed ya.”
A young woman who looked like she had just lost her baby teeth went trotting up to the stage from the flock. “Pastor Cleaver, I had four tumors in my skull here and doctors didn’t want to operate no more. So I called ya up, and I ordered ya water, and glory be to God, I’m healed. Lord Hallelujah!”
“Hallelujah!”
“Hallelujah!” echoed the flock.
He was always touching people on their faces and chests. He would close his eyes and repeat these words I didn’t understand: “Eeeek tal’alla mande, eeeek tal’alla mande.” And then he would pull his hand off their faces real fast and jump back as if he just saw a spider, and the “lovely” would convulse and fall to the ground. Sometimes men would jump out of wheelchairs and start dancing, and the “flock” would cry and shout.
In between the screaming and calling and speaking in tongues, the program would cut to Pastor Cleaver sitting in a big white chair with a pixilated fireplace lit behind him. A telephone number would sparkle across the bottom of the screen: 1-800-555-HEAL.
“I know you’ve heard it before, but here it is again, my lovelies. Call this number now and receive the miracle that is the power of the Lord. You will reap what you sow. There it is, say it with me now: you will reap what you sow. Call now, my lovelies, make haste.”
I didn’t call Pastor Cleaver. I changed the channel to Nick at Nite even though there weren’t any cartoons on. I liked the old shows like Cheers and The Cosby Show—Mr. Cosby seemed like a nice man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. But my favorite was Three’s Company, the one where this guy lived near the beach in California with two girls and had this weird landlord who was always wearing a robe. Chrissy, with her bright blonde hair, was my favorite.
I would’ve done anything to live near the beach on an island. It wouldn’t even need to be one of the popular islands, like where Paxton Shaffer went on vacation. It could be any island; it just needed sun and sand and big palm trees. But we never went to any islands or even California. During the summer we would spend a week with my father’s side of the family in Stone Harbor and the subsequent week in Ocean City, for my mom. She grew up spending her summers there, escaping Philadelphia for a few months every year—her uncle still has a house on 1st and Atlantic Avenue.
Pierce Stone said that Ocean City is full of Philly trash, but it always seemed clean to me. I didn’t know how Philadelphia garbage could reach the Jersey Shore anyway.
“Vito,” my dad called from the top of the steps. “You still awake, pal?”
When I heard my dad’s voice, I flung onto my side and closed my eyes. He came down the steps into the basement. I was amazing at pretending to be asleep. I loved to pretend I was asleep when I was in the car. It’s how I found out that my cousins wouldn’t play with Britney when we were at the lake house and that Mr. Geiger was a millionaire. I was oddly proud of my skill.
“Hello, my friend.” He sat at the foot of the bed. For all he knew, I was deep in a dream, in a galaxy far, far away. But he continued, “What did you think about your father’s talk? Hmm? Hey, Vito, you awake?” I was absolutely nailing it, possibly my best performance yet. “What you got on here? Is that Three’s Company? That Suzanne Somers was really something, huh?” Still nothing; I was a rock. “Okay then, see you tomorrow, my friend.” And he rubbed my shoulder and turned off the TV.
Mum Mum, my grandmother on my mother’s side, always taped paleontology documentaries for me. She found it strange that a seven-year-old indulged in such dry footage but perpetuated anything that didn’t include spinning hedgehogs or marauding orcs.
I had a growing library of VHS tapes chronicling the various discoveries of our earthly predecessors. The dino and its dig site were written in red Sharpie on the sides of the tape: Brontosaurus—Wyoming, Allosaurus—Colorado, Archaeopteryx—Offenbach, not far from where my mother’s family was from in Germany.
But this time the VHS tape didn’t have an old British man with a gray beard talking into the camera as he crossed desolate Mongolian steppes. Instead, it was a claymation video with a generic orange dinosaur—a Tyrannosaurus, I suppose—that was crying and crying and crying and screaming this high-pitched, blood-curdling scream, declaring that he didn’t want to die. A voice had been narrating the video; it had been a nice video with nothing controversial or inspiring of note, but the voice wouldn’t give the wailing dino solace of any kind.
“I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die! Ahh ha ah ahhh!” I had the blanket up to my nose, curling myself into the corner of the couch. What the heck was Mum Mum thinking? “I don’t want to die!”
“It must happen,” said the sonorous voice from the black.
“I don’t want to die!”
WHOOOOOOOM!!!
And the dinosaur and the trees and everything around them vanished.
“And that was the end of the dinosaurs.”
Credits.
“Mom!!!”
My mother kicked back her chair and swung open the door to her office with her reading glasses tilted at the bottom of her nose. “What? What is it? What happened?”
“I don’t want to die!” I was covered in the
