a happy little dinosaur

equal parts grief and guilt color the night dried to studs of algae green and infection red, under a heat lamp's light rendered brittle and boring.

i thought i knew. i thought i would know.

i thought it was only a joke.

michael, the angel, kept me company, a flurry of white noise guarding my restless bed from the now tomblike toll of street sounds. he filtered the sunlight into rainbows, rode a volcano toward heaven, and thrashed his tail with manifest annoyance.

even through his displeasure, he smiled. maybe he was laughing at me, plotting something. he smiled.

he loved the floor, and the shelves, and the ceiling of the water. sometimes he really loved to be out in my world, beyond the bucket.

and he was not very good at swimming. he's bad at it, i often said. he went from lazy hibernation to frenzied foraging back to acting like it hadn't even happened, just like that. his feet flailed. he constantly fell.

i don't know if he drowned, and subsequently fell upside down. he resorted to death drops with so little provocation, when i wandered near. it is an unfortunate truth that i always felt dissuaded from interacting more closely. he seemed to be scared, or disdainful.

that was his right, after all. i was fostering him. no one asked him how he felt, or told him he had to like it. no one knew how.

he never bit me, or snapped, or clawed. my fingers never came close enough for it to be possible. toward the end, i nearly always wore gloves.

usually, i grasped at the sides of his stony shell and turned him up out of the lateral plane, watching his head track its otherwise intended course via vestibulo-ocular side-eye. occasionally, i gave his neck a gentle prod, marveling at how truly vulnerable the squishy parts of him were.

once, i touched his claws. that was when he was already gone, and it was too late.

i had him for one hundred and eighty-eight days. six months. he saw me from my belated birthday party to a turning point in my new job. i remember him banging rocks around the tank to wake me up, one week in. he stared at me. he smiled.

he connected me in an even stranger and more natural way to the people i love. he gave me a fascinating and unorthodox reason to be responsible.

he wasn't a very old little man. he certainly acted antic enough to be my silly, stupid son. he was wise only in ways i never knew, will never know.

he was a happy little dinosaur. how does one so modern and scattered take care of a happy little dinosaur?

i think this reticent reptile took care of me.