When I Woke Up: Modifying Monterosso’s Dinosaur

Based on Augusto Monterosso’s “The Dinosaur,” which reads: “Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.” (When he/she/it awoke, the dinosaur was still there.) Given as a prompt by novelist Charlson Ong during the 2023 Gemino Abad Seminar-Workshop for Literature Teachers, which I then turned into a slightly lengthier flash fiction piece.

When I woke up, the dinosaurs were still there. Recalling I was running late for a workshop, I whistled from my hotel window to call the attention of the nearest apatosaurus. I slid down its neck, its spine, its tail, and landed right next to a taxi waiting at the gas station across the street. I told the driver I needed to be at the UP Diliman NISMED auditorium in fifteen minutes. He told me to hop in, and we made bubbly, cartoonish sounds with our feet as we propelled the vehicle forward. To clear the way, the driver kept squeezing the tail of the horn-billed bird on his hood. The honking sound it made was loud enough to move the public utility brachiosauruses (PUBs) and private car-ceratopses aside, but the moto-velociraptors were as unpredictable in their swerving as ever. We turned the corner into the Diliman campus, and I arrived just in time at the registration table. I proceeded to my seat, and as I sat down, a quiet “YABA-DABA-DOO” resounded in my mind.

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