By Josh Blackmon

 "Let's have a baby"

Those were the last words that Noah Greene ever said to Elizabeth. It never failed he always seemed to wake up from his dream at the exact same moment. No matter how much he worked on his conscious mind forgetting her, his subconscious couldn't seem to let the whole scenario go.

Noah was in love and wanted nothing more than to start a family with Elizabeth, Elizabeth wanted nothing more than to order pizza for dinner. They were two different people going down two different paths that had by chance intersected, no matter how much he wanted her he knew that at some point their paths would diverge again. And now he new that split was immanent and unavoidable.

When he saw the strangely ambiguous help wanted ad pop up on the side of the browser window that night he clicked on it out of desperation and curiosity. Some people would say he was running away from his problems. Noah would just laugh and say, "nah, not running away just in the other direction."

The truth was Noah was looking for any excuse to get out the small one bedroom apartment he was still sharing with Elizabeth and the new guy she was seeing.

South Dakota seemed like the perfect place to get lost.

Eight years ago when they unveiled the first cloned mammoth it was a scientific marvel, an advancement unmatched in the last century. To the board of trustees at the University of Denali just outside of Williams, South Dakota it had been a miracle.

Dr. Rita Horne had moved back to Williams to be with her ailing mother, and as her mother's health improved she decided to get out of the house and a position in the genetics lab at the college had been available. She laughed the first time she saw the lab. It was little more than a kitchen, and at the time it was being used more as a catch all for party decorations and old course catalogs. She couldn't believe she was going to start form the ground up.

Again.

Her previous engagement had been the lead on the group that had cloned Harriette the Mammoth. Now she was teaching freshmen their genome from a lawn gnome. She loved her mother so she stayed and she was never one to back down from a challenge.

Two years later and with a little pull by her own acclaim, Rita had the premier genetics facility in the U.S. and had the pick of the litter for graduate students. She looked for the people that reminded her of herself at that age. Bright, eager and willing to look past ethics for the common goal of the project. People who knew Rita learned quickly that despite her 5'4" slender frame she was ruthless and a force to be reckoned with.

Noah had only met Rita once since he had been working at the exhibit. She had come to talk at an orientation for the first group of keepers. She explained how they had been able to bring the creatures back from oblivion and myth and with behavioral drugs had made them docile as a house cat. It was all over Noah's head, he did comprehend what his duty was though, he as a glorified shit picker upper for dinosaurs.

Noah hadn't grown up reading Jurassic Park, he'd never even seen the entire movie. It was on TNT once but he had fallen asleep. He didn't know a triceratops from velociraptor and he was fine with that. He didn't care about dinosaurs. He didn't even really like animals in general all that much, that made it even more astounding that they hired him to work in the exhibit to begin with. He later found out they had specifically sought out people that wouldn't get attached to the exhibits.

One of the catches to what Dr. Horne had accomplished was that the specimens never lived longer than a year or two. But they didn't have to. They were clones. Each one identical and easy to manufacture. The exhibits at the university were essentially the equivalent to the hamster cage in a kindergarten class. As long as the teacher was able to switch out the dead hamster before the kids got to class no one was the wiser. And Mrs. Thomas' class hamster could live for 20 years. It was a closely guarded secret. As long as Noah or one of the other keepers did a sweep and cleared out the carcasses before the exhibit opened all was well with the world and the to the public the university could maintain it's pristine image.

The display animals were to be treated simply as that, a display. They had no feelings, they had no right to even exist on earth again. They were property of the university, valuable property that Noah now clutched close to his body as his pickup truck barreled out of the parking lot.

Noah had made the biggest mistake he never thought he would make. He got attached to the display.

"I never should have named you," Noah joked with the stegosaurus that was no bigger than a labrador retriever.

She was beautiful. He had felt an immediate connection with this one the day he had gotten her from the holding pen after incinerating specimen 1002822DF. She was just a replacement. But Noah knew better. He looked into her big dark cow eyes and without even thinking called her Stephie. It was like she knew her own name. She did that weird purr sound that they would sometime make. It was a rare sound as the specimens were rarely ever happy. To Noah they always seemed sort of sedated. He assumed it was the medicine they gave them to calm them down so they wouldn't bite the kids in the petting zoo.

But when Stephie had started showing the signs of age Noah couldn't let her die in that enclosure. He just couldn't let her die. He held back tears as he looked down at the passenger seat and Stephie looked back up at him.

He swore that she smiled.

Between the lines

This is one of the few stories I may revisit at some point and continue. I really, really like dinosaurs.

Spoiler Alert: People seemed to have read this story in a happy or uplifting light. I am fine with that. Read what you will out of it, it is the joy of art. But when I was writing it I don't see it as a happy story. I'm glad Noah found something to love that could love him in return, but fact is fact, the dinosaur will die. They are designed to.