DISCOVERY

When I got to work, it was all anyone could talk about. That picture of the bearded guy—the scientist, we supposed—walking out of the Borneo forest, cradling it like a baby. The thing, whatever it was, looked a little bit like a cat, but hairless. Those green piercing eyes, that foot-long neck. Do you think it’s really a dinosaur, said one woman. Not a real one, said someone else, it’s like a—a—descendent or something. How did it survive, said our boss, who’d come over to join the conversation. I guess it just kept its head down, I said, and this proved to be sufficiently funny to elicit stooping-head dinosaur impressions from my co-workers for the rest of the day. Then the rest of the week. When they were still doing it after a year, I had to ask them to stop. But by that time, of course, they’d all done such permanent damage to their backs that they couldn’t stop, even if they’d wanted to.