by Scott Taylor
“HE IS RETURNED,” read the sandwich-board sign on the gas station curb. Martha wasn’t sure which of the two figures it meant.
The dinosaur, a Brontosaur, was painted by a hand whose skill outstripped both the plywood canvas and cheap acrylic paint upon it. Trundling along a burning blue river, the Brontosaur emerged from a green swath of fecundity both ancient and modern—none of which Martha suspected was actually native to New Mexico. Still, she had to admire the artist’s ability to blend enough different shades of neon green that the whole scene was legible. The brushstrokes were so thick and reflective as to blind anyone who bore witness head-on. Thankfully, Martha had come equipped with sunglasses.
The sanctity of her eyes, however, came at the cost of Jesus. Unlike His vibrant and vivacious dinosaur, the Nazarene was a paper image cut from some other source, one that shamefully depicted Him in low and Earthly tones rather than the searing revelation of electric lime green. Through her sunglasses, Martha could barely make out any details of the man at all. He had been plastered to the Brontosaur’s back before the acrylic set and so rode side-saddle like a woman of good breeding.
Martha pulled the camera strap off her neck, its leather so well-supped on sweat that she wondered if it was technically skin again. “Sorry bud, I know this won’t be easy for you.” She levelled the lens at the painted proclamation and knew deep in her core that the light contrast would be unfixable. So, as she planted one ocean-blue painted nail against the shutter button, Martha let the dilemma settle into the silt of her head.
Steed or rider, which of the two would she correct for?
Move Over UFOs, New Mexico Has a New—or Old—Arrival
by Martha Swell & Vic Slate
Residents of Wallace, New Mexico received quite the shocking wake-up call on the morning of June 8th, 2025, as many reported thunderous poundings and ‘trumpet-like’ sounds from nearby Sapphire Lake.
While many feared some manner of illegal construction or a revival of the old Wallace coal mine—which rendered Sapphire Lake toxic for multiple years after its irresponsibly-handled closure in 1967—there seems to be a much different sort of revival going on.
The specific species noted by Wallace locals vary, and most struggled to identify distinct species at all given their lack of familiarity. However, there have been numerous claims of such well-renowned sorts as Triceratops. As of now, no dinosaur-related injuries have been reported, and videos taken of the event have yet to be verified as authentic. However, reports of dinosaur activity continue to pour in.
“It had a massive head, like a dinner platter with horns! The thing tore out my entire rose bush and ate it, thorns and all!” writes Mrs. Barbara Gallardo on her neighborhood’s online message board. “I’ve tried to contact animal control but the line was busy for three hours straight!”
Wallace municipal animal control has so far refused to comment. With flash-flood warnings currently in effect, local authorities have requested that people keep emergency lines clear.
Unearthly cobalt slushy filled Martha’s cup, invoking a pale reflection of condensation outside. Martha wiped some of those blissful beads of water and traded them for the tacky sweat across her hairline.
Vic had planted his right cheek against one of the machines to steal its cool. At least he had the decency to choose the generic cola flavor he’d be drinking from. He huffed at Martha’s preference. “You know the EU banned Blue 1? That’d be illegal over there.”
“Do you think raspberry bushes are getting body image issues from not being blue enough?”
“Reality’s a sucker’s game.” Vic cooled his palm against the machine to rub the part of his chest not covered by his tank-top. Then, without bothering about his drink, he produced a microphone from his satchel and plugged in its recording deck. “Speaking of, I’m gonna get us some quotes to tack on.”
Vic had a large and hairy build, so Martha forgave his perpetual impatience in the same way she would for a husky in this heat. She did, however, let his slushy overfill enough to justify slurping at the edges.
By the time Martha approached the checkout counter, Vic was already well into an interview with the clerk—River, according to their nametag.
They wore a jean jacket, which at first puzzled Martha for its impracticality. But she caught a fascinating array of pins and patches splayed from cuff to collar: pride flags of various stripes, fictional characters and referential quotes she recognized, many more she did not, and most notably a feathered velociraptor wielding a hammer and sickle. Martha nodded sagely at this prophet’s gospel. Thankfully, a buzzing little fan behind the counter kicked at River’s short, sun-frazzled hair.
“So, what can you tell me about the sign out there?” Vic tilted the microphone across the counter.
“The sign.” River rolled their eyes. “Makes it embarrassing just to work here.”
“I can imagine.”
“Having Tyrannosaurs, Ankylosaurs, Triceratops, and—” River gestured in disbelief, “Brontosaurs all walking through the same jungle? Who invited the Jurassic giant to a late-Cretaceous scene?” They trapped Vic in a relentless flow of words. “We live closer to Tyrannosaurus than Brontosaurus did—the whole thing is nearly 100 million years off! And of course they all look like skeletons wrapped in lizard-skin. Where’s all the soft tissue? Where are the feathers? Maybe not on Ankylosaurs, but the T-Rex? Seriously?”
Martha craned her neck to peer at the painted sign through the gas station window. She picked out all the dinosaurs, and from this distance could scarcely make out Jesus as more than a strange smudge on the back of the big one. Turning back to the counter, she found Vic’s eyelids struggling against their own weight.
“Right. Quite the… paleontological inaccuracy.”
Martha set the slushies on the counter and leaned in. “But, brontos, rexes, trikes, and ankies all lived in what would become western North America. So, if dinosaurs were to somehow return to the world, might we not see all four of them here, despite the eras?”
Vic contained a huff in his throat, as if the question of which kind of dinosaur might be roaming around Wallace, New Mexico was of no importance.
“Actually, that would only be Brontosaurus.” River had clearly forgotten the microphone, leaning over the counter in such a way that forced Vic to contort his arm just to get it back in front of their face. “You know about the Western Interior Seaway, right?”
It breached the surface of Martha’s memory, some term that she’d brushed over in her limited research time before she and Vic had set out to pursue the story.
Vic muttered, “Who could forget about the Western Interior Seaway?”
“Right, it defined so much of the Cretaceous!” River reached out toward the window, splaying their fingers flat to cover the horizon. “Thing is, most of the land that would become New Mexico was completely submerged. The terrestrial Cretaceous dinosaurs would only be found to the west of here—or way out east maybe.” Their eyes glimmered in the sunlight flooding through the front, as if something celestial were talking through them. “A whole sea, shallow but so full of life—about as far from high desert as you can get.”
Martha gazed at the blocky gray shape of Wallace lording over its expanses of bleached sand, and nodded.
Then, River declared, “You’re looking for a Mosasaur.”
“The big swimming ones! You’ve seen it?” Martha scrambled for any details on the beast while Vic nudged her so he could straighten out his arm.
“I’m double-shifted through the rest of the week, haven’t been out to Sapphire Lake yet. But a population of Mosasaurs surviving for 66 million years makes a little more sense than something else making it another 100, right?”
“So why the land-lubbers on the sign?” Vic pressed.
“It’s not mine.” River tore off a strip of blank receipt paper and shook a flimsy little pen until it would write. “I think I know who painted it though. I take some classes at Wallace Community, and would you believe they only have one art teacher?” They scribbled down a name and office number. “You’ll have to ask her.”
Martha snatched the paper with covetous enthusiasm while Vic reached for the recording deck.
“Although,” River added quickly, “I have seen something smaller.”
[…]River Langdon followed a Nyctosaur through the night of June 9th: “I think it was looking for something, you know? Its wings were locked and it kept turning around, going from building to building. And Nyctosaurs, right, they’re only about the size of eagles, so I would have lost it easily if not for the crest. I mean, each prong was longer than the whole rest of its body! I was worried it would get caught on some power line. So, anyway, I kept up with it all the way to the edge of town, and then we took off into the desert. It would fly for minutes, land on a rock, look around, and take back up into the sky. I could only see it by the stars it was blotting out above me. And I thought it might have been hungry, but then why would it have left town? There was something more important going on. But I never figured out what it was looking for. Eventually it flew up past a cliff and I figured, you know, I might be able to climb that, but then I wondered if maybe it didn’t want me to see what it was after.”
Vic folded his arms on the roof of the car while he sipped at his slushy and melted before Martha’s very eyes. He scowled at the bag of apples in her hand. “From a gas station?”
She tossed them in the back seat. “You’ll thank me when you don’t get scurvy on the way home.”
Vic bared his pink gums and only slightly yellow teeth. “Assuming those aren’t just wax. So, you want to take the lake or the college?”
“You know the symptoms of heat stroke, right?” Martha asked.
“I’m gonna guess hallucinations.” Vic panted like a true Synapsid despite the interior seaway of sweat already dripping from him.
Martha shrugged. “Well I didn’t bring a bathing suit, so, you know…”
“And? Neither did I. We’re working.”
“You can just drop me off at the college.”
“Sure.” Vic slid right into the driver’s seat. He yanked at his seatbelt, but his voice remained slow and unbothered. “We can meet back up at that diner afterwards.”
Martha hopped in beside him, taking a long drag on her slushy. “I’m sure it’s fine to just swim in your underwear though, right?”
Vic pinched the sweat out of his eyes while pulling onto the road. He muttered something about staying focused but drifted off partway through the sentence.
Martha watched Wallace transform from a low-lying gray mass to individual buildings and streets, flat and widespread like a lizard sunning itself. “Slow down.”
Vic’s eyes darted across the dusty road. “Speed trap?”
“No, I just don’t want you to hit… something.”
“Seriously?” Vic returned to ten miles over the speed limit.
“It’s a whole town, not one nutcase. That has to mean something.”
“You would’ve killed it in Salem back in the day.” Vic flicked on his blinker after a rolling stop at a sign.
Martha stared at every street corner they passed, but only saw people going about their business. “Tell you what, I’ll keep my eye out for big wooden stakes if you keep yours out for brontos.”
Vic furrowed his brows. “How bad a driver do you think I am?”
“Sabbatical?” Martha deflated at the Wallace Community College information desk.
“You missed Professor Hildegard by a few days.” The young man tapped slender fingers on his little keyboard in between sips of an energy drink. “Sorry, things have been a little hectic around here, considering.”
“Do you have her address?”
The receptionist finished the last of his drink, crushed the can against the desk, and pulled another one from beneath his chair. “I can give you her email address. Are you a student?”
Martha shook her head.
“Well, she should be back next quarter.”
“Sure.” Martha turned, and got halfway across the lobby before spinning on a heel and fishing for her notebook. “Sorry, one more thing.” She clicked her pen. “What kinds of dinosaurs have you seen lately?”
He rubbed the dark crescents under his eyes. “Man, let me tell you,”
[…] Silvester Hughes recounts his terrifying confrontation with an unknown variety of Pterosaur: “I had to hide in the pantry, its wings were taking up the whole kitchen. One foot on a box of rice crackers, one holding the door shut so it couldn’t get its beak inside, and I was just swinging my broom over and over. Then I felt something tugging at the handle. It caught the broom in its beak and nearly yanked me right out with it! If I hadn’t gotten the doors shut in time, I don’t know what might have happened. Spent the whole night listening to it shuffling around and making these little trilling noises. I don’t know, maybe they’re here to punish Humanity for… everything.”
Wallace Community College’s tasteful native plant gardens mocked Martha as she sat in the shade of a mangy little tree. Well, they’d get what was coming to them when the next Triceratops came by looking for a snack.
She’d sent an email to Hildegard, but knew better than to expect an answer. Martha got up and walked across campus, wondering how much cyber-stalking she could do to someone before it constituted journalistic malpractice.
“What are you looking for?”
The question fell so abruptly onto Martha that she instinctively rubbed her head.
There stood a man in the main square, just far enough from the edge to be a nuisance. His reserved haircut and clean-shaven face were utterly forgettable, but perhaps that was his plan considering the rack of bright orange books set up behind him.
“Dinosaurs.” Martha would have simply kept walking, were it not for what else surrounded the man. Propped up on familiar sandwich-board signs were masterful acrylic paintings, each one depicting dinosaurs so bright as to be apostles of the midday sun. Pasted haphazardly amongst the beasts were yet more mismatched cut-outs of Jesus.
The walkway preacher offered her one of the small orange books. He grinned with more teeth than most people had in all their gums. “Then, like them, you are found.”
He was holding the cover of the pocket-bible open, revealing the first page scrawled with, “Witness and Join the True Revival, 9:00pm, June 10th, by Sapphire Lake.”
Martha held her hand back. “Where did you get these paintings?”
The walkway preacher’s jaw seemed unable to relax while he held that book forward. “There is a woman who has received revelation in these final days.”
“I’d like to talk to her.”
A pen was suddenly in the walkway preacher’s hand. He scrawled an address in the pocket bible then tilted the cover down just enough that Martha couldn’t see it.
Martha took the pocket bible, but drew her own pen while students passed by without the chance to be accosted. “So tell me, which dinosaurs have you seen lately?”
“The loudest of all His heralds.”
[…] One travelling preacher, Peter Oldnews, witnessed a Tyrannosaurus Rex while setting up a tent on the shore of Sapphire Lake, “Oh yes, it snarled and snorted through an inferno of teeth. It came upon me in the dark of night, as I know better than to ask this secularist city government for permission to hold our True Revival. And although I was ready to join our Lord, I balked when its roar tore through me, for the sake of those who I have not yet shown the path. There I stood, Bible in hand, stock still as I remembered to trust His plan. And just as the beasts in the Garden were cowed as lambs beneath Adam, that antediluvian tyrant turned away from me, for He—” here Peter pointed to the sky “—rode upon its back, and He is King of Kings.”
Unlike her ancient Synapsid ancestors, Martha just couldn’t find a dinosaur on the streets of Wallace. There was no Tyrannosaur kept at bay by faith, merely an oversized truck creeping up on a red light. No Pterosaur sniffing for misdeeds, merely a stray cat sniffing for the pepperoni stick in Martha’s pocket. No Nyctosaur on a secret quest, merely Martha herself.
Those long-gone little mammals would surely have found Martha unbearably spoiled for her disappointment. And for giving up her pepperoni stick so easily.
Upon arriving at the address written in her pocket bible, Martha dared hope that her search was not yet over.
The house lay so flat that it was nearly lost amidst an unreasonably lush garden. Such greenery defied the Holocene moment of the land, a florid jungle whose very air stuck cool to Martha’s skin as she dared inside. She shut her eyes, breathed in a humming chorus of thick green leaves, and envisioned that she would open them to see the gentle lord of the Jurassic lowering its great neck to welcome her.
Instead, peering at her from beside a half-built garage, was an old woman. Glasses like appetizer-plates dominated her face, while an untamable mass of white framed it from behind. Her hair and skin alike had been cracked by the heat. She was a woman of overcooked pottery, as if unearthed from some too-recent past.
“Professor Hildegard?” Martha asked. It came out quieter than she meant, some Synapsid part of her still not yet sure what else lurked in the garden.
Hildegard curled a dexterous hand around the garage wall, unwilling to step away from it. “You’re not one of my students, are you?”
“No, my name’s Martha Swell—”
“Good. I don’t have time for much else right now.”
Martha joined Hildegard in the shade of the garage. It was mostly roof, with only the wooden support structure of hypothetical walls holding it up. But the garage was by no means bare. Paintings hung from haphazard nails or stood up on the raw cement floor. An acrylic haze staggered Martha at the entry, but she pushed on hoping that enough breeze blew through the walls to keep the place safe for human habitation.
As Martha’s eyes adjusted to the dark, they were no longer her own. Each painting drew them in with its dinosaurs, always walking in the same direction, leading her to the next in a single gestalt procession. There was no image of Jesus, and yet Martha couldn’t deny that all these ancient beasts looked toward some sort of Messiah at the far end of the garage.
This one was a picture, expanded so large that Martha could make out individual pixels if she squinted. It was not quite black and white, but it might as well have been. The fossil’s eyes were gone. All the same, it implored something of Martha. She approached slowly, unsure of what.
It was nearly the whole front half of the dino, armored back plates so well-preserved that Martha could feel their rough texture on her fingertips. But those were nothing compared to the face. For it had one. Not just bone, but skin and structure such that the black nothing where once eyes had been could still look back and meet her gaze.
“It’s an anky.” Martha could think of nothing else to say.
Hildegard hunched in front of an easel, slathering a few small raptors in luminous red streaks. She worked the paint until, miraculously, it became delicate feathers upon their heads. “They say it drowned. Swept away in a flood. I suppose the river must have been too strong for it to swim back out.”
Martha found her notepad and pen in hand. It seemed right. “No. Ankylosaurs are from the Cretaceous.”
Hildegard rested a brush against her canvas.
“It was swept all the way out to sea.” Martha shuffled her feet, feeling that the sand would be pulled out from under them. “It must have been so scared.”
“Hand me the blue, please.”
Martha pulled her eyes away long enough to find the tube of paint.
Hildegard began overriding the landscape she’d first put before the trio of raptors. A clearing of ferns was swept away by raspberry-blue water, until the little beasts finally arrived at the shore of the Western Interior Seaway. “I’ve been walking with them in my dreams for weeks. We’re coming to see it alive again.”
Martha realized that she too had joined the dinosaurs on all these meters of canvas, but breathed heavy, for they were only paint. “I’ve seen your work around town, although with some interesting additions.”
“I tried to show Mr. Oldnews,” Hildegard flicked a blue-coated brush at the solemn fossil. “He preferred his own pictures, but there’s not too much difference, is there? When He is returned, all will be well.” She shrugged, with her shoulders seeming to fall lower than they’d been before.
Being so close, Martha could see the depths of exhaustion beneath Hildegard’s glasses. “You haven’t been sleeping well, Professor?”
“Of course not. I spend all my time in bed walking.”
Martha considered the sorts of things a sleep-deprived mind could conjure up. “It looks like you’ve been at this for a while.”
Hildegard leaned in to fuss over how each raptor’s feathers settled. “You know we really don’t have much idea what a lot of them looked like in life. Just bones. Well, present company excluded.” She nodded at the drowned Ankylosaur.
“Professor Hildegard, may I ask when you saw your first living dinosaur?”
For a long moment, Hildegard seemed not to have heard. Once she finished her feathers and began to paint shadows out in the water, she answered, “It’s the strangest thing, that I was the only one to see them. They were so big.”
[…] Professor Hildegard claims to have encountered two of the gargantuan Brontosaurus, multiple days earlier than any other reported sighting, “I had taken to the cliffs near Sapphire Lake in the evening after I saw the fossil. Perhaps the life of the desert would help me clear my mind of what happened in that ancient water. It was the tearing of the shrubs that first alerted me. Roots and all, a creature was pulling them from the cliff’s edge as it stood on the ground far below. Had I been less tired, or perhaps not already visited by their lost kin, I would have screamed. But there was no cause anyway. It meant me no harm, and in fact seemed to regard me with a certain calm intelligence. I think then I knew of what I’ve already told you. But it was only upon looking down the cliff that I understood the magnitude of the situation. You see, the Brontosaur was pulling up all those shrubs to give to a smaller one beside it. Its child. Nobody believed me at first, but times are clearly changing.”
Neither Martha nor Vic spoke much at first. The diner’s air conditioning was a welcome reprieve after Martha’s trek, but Vic’s hair and clothes were damp, pasted to his body as if he hadn’t had time to dry off before getting dressed. He shivered.
Martha rested her cheek on her hand despite the painful way it pushed into her teeth. Vic kept stealing her fries but wouldn’t look up from the table, eyes darting across it.
Clouds were gathering outside the window, an anachronism in the summer sky. “It can’t just be a mass-hallucination, right? Everyone’s stories are too different. Too specific,” Martha said.
Vic muttered something through a mouthful of burger meat and ketchup.
“Look I know it doesn’t make any sense for Brontosaurs to be here, okay? But it wouldn’t be the first time some sorry dino wound up in the Western Interior Seaway.”
Vic huffed hard through his nostrils as he chewed, each time shutting his eyes tight as if they needed to be reset.
“Stuff happens. I mean, they drown and get eaten and get buried in mudslides, and then some big dumb rock comes out of nowhere and poof, just like that. And all that’s left is minerals that used to be bones? What’s so crazy about it going the other way around?”
Vic looked at the clock on the wall as it ticked forward, but he stole a few more fries to keep his mouth too full to speak.
“Nobody was there to help the Ankylosaur.”
Vic chewed slowly and stopped fidgeting.
“Something that precious just got swept away in a flood, left to die in the sea? Isn’t it only right that it gets to come back?”
Vic stopped chewing. The only evidence he was even alive were the flaring of his nostrils and the shiver that hadn’t left his eyes.
“But they’re just… not here.”
Vic flinched at the first few drops of rain striking the window beside him, and in that motion Martha saw millions of years of Synapsid cowering.
Martha laid her notepad on the table. “Vic.”
Vic shook his head.
“What kind?”
[…] One man, who wishes to remain anonymous, recounted his narrow escape from a Mosasaur, “I know how big fish can get, Martha. Sapphire Lake doesn’t even have fish anymore. Well it was sunny, and hot, and there were only these shitty little trees standing around the lake, and some weird tent with nobody inside, so I took a swim. The lake was so clear, I wanted to see the deepest part. And sure, there were some stupid little fish swimming around like they didn’t know they were supposed to be extinct, but beneath them… do you have any idea how big a Mosasaur’s mouth is? It was bigger than me. I think the thing was trying to figure out what I was, and it was coming closer. If it weren’t for a stretch of sand jutting out from shore, I wouldn’t have made it in time. Martha, we only exist because of that big dumb rock.”
Martha sat on the hood of the car while the sky bled out around her. All that rain struck the corrugated metal roof above the motel parking spaces, setting the whole world to a hollow keening beat. Of all the impossible things she was supposed to see here, Martha was left with dark clouds that covered the stars and the downpour of the millennia.
The searing heat of day was over, but this rain brought a different sort of heat, something fertile and long forgotten.
Perhaps by morning, all would be floating.
Martha hadn’t told Vic about the tent revival going on tonight. What was the point? River had mentioned Mosasaurs, then Vic had swum in a deep lake, and there was probably some strange-looking rock that—at best—had once been a Mosasaur eons ago.
Her throat tightened, and for a moment she had to blink away tears. “Why not?” She croaked to the rain. “Would it be such a big deal just to let it come back?”
She couldn’t go back to the motel room and draft another conclusion. She refused to believe that so many people could just have imagined them. She lay back against the car.
Martha fished the keys out of her pocket.
By the time Martha reached Sapphire Lake, she could feel the weight of the mud on the tires.
She stormed out of the driver’s seat and up to the revival tent, a sagging thing under the deluge. She hadn’t decided whether to demand the stories of everyone there, to scream and warn them about the Mosasaur before anyone went to get baptized in the lake, or to go join them just so she could see for herself.
There stood, before the tent, a sandwich-board sign with three plain words on an empty plywood background, “POSTPONED FOR WEATHER.”
Martha stood in the rain, waiting for an inferno of teeth to appear from the dark, until every inch of her was saturated with water. She turned back to the car.
Her own steps made weak little squelches. So, when she heard deeper, heavier sucking of mud on feet, Martha knew there was someone else waiting by the passenger side. She could barely see by now. Even the light pollution of Wallace bent before the endless rain. It was as if the air itself was relenting. Martha nearly walked right into the Ankylosaur.
Its ruddy eyes caught the reflection of her keychain flashlight, and it made a strange and throaty sound, squaring its shoulders at her. Martha would have flinched at something so loud, but the rain roared upon the world and reduced the two of them to creatures of much the same might.
“I don’t think it’s going to let up.” Martha only heard her own voice as it rattled around in her head.
The Ankylosaur stomped its feet and pulled its cumbersome body through the mud, great bony plates churning grooves with each turn, scaled throat filling with worried calls. It wouldn’t be able to walk for very long like this. And soon, the lake would flood.
Martha got in the passenger side and crawled into the back seats. She flung the door open and fished an apple from the gas station bag, then bit off a chunk to free the sweet smell and held it out.
The Ankylosaur’s nostrils flared. It turned to the last dry place in all the Western Interior Seaway.
“Come on, buddy.” Martha shuffled back to give the Ankylosaur room. “We’re not supposed to be out here right now.”
Scott Taylor (he/him) is short story and novel writer most interested in speculative and surreal fiction. He works as a fiction editor and lives in Bellingham, Washington with his family and a decisive black cat. With a fascination in the hidden wonders and terrors of the world, he explores multiple media of art, from prose to playwriting to music, finding that each medium feeds into the others.
Scott’s short stories have been featured in three previous HamLit issues: “It Came from the Ocean, and It Was” in Special Issue ’24: After Dark, “Laws of Attraction” in Autumnal Equinox: Hearth Songs, and “The Stoneshaper” was featured in Summer Solstice: Life Expectancy.