Minimans Chapter 2
Dr. Spencer Reid was just finishing an indefinitely long treatise on all the solutions to all the world's problems when he woke up. Since his eidetic memory did not cover non-waking states of consciousness, Dr. Spencer Reid forgot his dream as soon as he woke up, and all the solutions to all the world's problems were lost forever.
Reid pushed himself up to a sitting position on the couch. It was not unusual for him to fall asleep on the couch, so the mere fact that he had fallen asleep on the couch did not alert him to the presence of home invaders. He performed his usual Saturday morning routine, making and downing a cup of coffee before any administrations of personal hygiene could be considered, much less undertaken. It was only when he was fully awake, padding down the hallway towards his bedroom, that the previous night's events came flooding out of his memory.
"Minimans!" Reid thought in fear tinged with warm fuzzies.
"Spiderman!" Reid thought in dread tinged with cold spinies.
The child luddite, who had now shortened the descriptor to childite, sprang into action. His first priority was to prevent any invocation of Spiderman by the older miniman, who had been bullshitted into believing that he would wake up with the agility and proportionate strength of an arachnid if he went to bed early the night before. The keeper darted back into the kitchen, checking all the counters, cabinets, and drawers, until he found the instrument of preemption that he had wisely prepared. It was a helmet of wonders, bearing a miniature railroad track that circled the shiny metal spheroid, complete with working train car full of passengers, all members of superorder Dinosauria, drawn in washable marker onto the tiny plastic-paned windows.
Reid donned the helmet. Fearing that the helmet would not be enough to distract the minimans from their Spiderman pajamas, he added a pair of hologram glasses bearing a terrifying image of the cannibal-scavenger Tyrannosaurus rex over each lens. He worked up the confidence to enter the bedroom.
On the bed, in a pool of bright morning sunshine, the minimans stirred.
"Hey Jack," Reid whispered to the older miniman. "Rise and shine, Jack. It's Saturday morning. Time for breakfast and Looney Tunes!"
Jack squirmed beneath the covers and opened his big brown eyes. He let out a blood-curdling scream at the sight that greeted him. The scream awakened Henry, who joined in screaming, shrinking away from the helmeted bespectacled creature that bore down upon him. The traumatized minimans kicked and cried until the equally traumatized keeper ripped off the helmet and glasses.
"Oh sorry! Sorry! Sorry!" Reid squealed in remorse. "It's OK, it's OK! It's only me, Uncle Spenny! There's nothing to be afraid of," he hugged the minimans to himself, patting them on the back to calm them, performing a cost-benefit analysis that weighed the benefits of distraction against the costs of terror in terms of psychological damage incurred.
"Uncle Spenny, you scared me," Jack whimpered. "I thought you were the Boogeyman coming to get me."
"I'm sorry, Jack, I'm sorry, Uncle Spenny is really sorry," Reid lifted the older miniman out of the bed and helped him change out of his Spiderman pajamas.
"C'mere, Henry," Reid gathered the younger miniman into his arms, "Time to take off those uncomfy pajamas!" he removed the Spiderman pajamas and stuffed both sets of garments under the bed.
"OK, who wants breakfast? What should we have? More eggs? Scrambled eggs? How about peas and carrots? Yummy vegetables for breakfast?" Reid babbled aimlessly as he dressed the minimans in matching sweaters knitted by Garcia in her dark hacker cave.
The sweaters bore the image from the Pioneer plaques, metal plates aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts that had exited the solar system after completing their missions in the 1970s. If the plaques were intercepted by extraterrestrials millions of years in the future, then the pictures were supposed to tell them about us, our solar system, and our primitive understanding of the universe. Garcia had replaced the nude man and woman on the plaques with an image of a fully dressed little boy wearing a sweater bearing the image from the Pioneer plaques, and so on and so on and so on, until the images reached the display limit of the finest thread.
"Is that a T. rex?" Jack reached for the glasses, no longer afraid now that the glasses lay inert on a bed instead of alive on a face.
"Yes, indeed," Reid replied, "Tyrannosaurus rex, King of the Tyrant Reptiles, roamed western North America in a huge range until the K-T extinction event 65 million years ago, caused by..."
"I wanna see a T. rex!" Jack interrupted Reid, "I wanna see a T. rex!"
"T. rex!" Henry laughed without comprehension.
"Who wants to go see T. rex?" Reid tapped his hands against his knees, peering down at the minimans on the floor. "Wash up, breakfast, then T. rex?" he herded his flock into the bathroom.
Amidst hearty screams of "T. rex! T. rex!" and sincere, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to explain the dietary habits of "Superfamily Tyrannosauroidea", the minimans were cleaned, fed, and bundled up in preparation for their visit to the National (Free) Museum of Natural History. The keeper smiled to himself as he buckled the minimans into their seats, Henry into his carseat, Jack into the backseat. He breathed in the chilly November air, feeling good about himself in his role as MommyAndDaddy, now that the irksome spider-related prefix had been dropped. He looked forward to visiting his beloved stuffed animal museum. The minimans might have screamed the loudest, but it was really the keeper who most wanted to go see T. rex.
At the entrance to the museum, where the minimans and the keeper walked through the metal detectors, Reid failed to notice a dark-haired boy, around ten years old, staring at him and his flock from behind the security desk. The boy, whose father manned the desk in his white uniform, stared sullenly at all the passing visitors, but did not leave his seat on a high stool until he spotted Reid, Jack, and Henry. He followed them as they circled the woolly mammoth in the rotunda.
"The woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, a species of proboscideans that inhabited northern Eurasia and northern North America for 150,000 years before its extinction at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, along with most other species of megafauna," Reid intoned solemnly.
"Probo...What?" Jack squeezed Reid's hand in urgent inquiry. "I don't understand, Uncle Spenny. What's a probosomething?"
"Proboscidean," Reid explained, "An order of mammals that includes mammoths, mastodons, and their living cousins, the elephants."
"I know all about elephants!" Jack exclaimed, "Daddy read to me about Babar!"
"Yes, Babar!" Reid tried to gesture excitedly, but discovered that both of his arms were occupied with the minimans.
"Babar! Babar! Babar!" Henry giggled as he repeated the name and probed his fingers into Reid's nostrils.
"No touchy nose," Reid guided Henry's fingers away from his proboscis. "Hey Henry, this way, look over here," he bounced the miniman in his arms to divert his attention towards the woolly mammoth. "Did you know that mammoths sprouted new sets of teeth throughout their lives, until they were too old to sprout more sets of teeth and died of starvation when their final set of teeth wore out?"
"They died of starvation? Poor mammoths! Poor mammoths starved to death!" Jack covered his ear with his free hand at the inappropriately morbid remark.
"Yes, Jack," Reid was further excited by the miniman's interest, misinterpreting Jack's horror as a sign to continue.
"Those who died of natural causes starved to death after they lost their teeth," he continued. "The ones who were hunted down, the ones who were food for us humans, were killed by spears thrown from an atlatl after becoming engulfed in mud in the thawing tundra."
"We ate Babar?" Jack asked in shock.
"Yes, we ate the extinct relatives of Babar, and we still do, even to this day," Reid replied. "Well-preserved mammoths are still found in Siberia every summer, and the scientists who dig them up have been known to sample their frozen ten-thousand-year-old flesh. Apparently, mammoth tastes like rotten beef."
"Ewwwwwww!" Jack let go of Reid's hand and covered both his ears.
Reid bent down to console the unhappy miniman.
"What's wrong, Jack? Don't you like mammoth stories?" he asked.
"No!" Jack declared, "I don't like hearing about bad people being mean to Babar!"
"OK, Jack, no more stories about bad people being mean to Babar. Let's talk about dinosaurs instead. T. rex, remember? That's what you wanted to see. Let's go see T. rex!" Reid turned the minimans towards the Dinosaur Hall.
"T. rex!" Henry poked at Reid's nose again.
"No touchy nose!" Reid guided the fingers away. "Let's go see T. rex!" the keeper and the minimans entered the Dinosaur Hall, with the dark-haired ten-year-old boy following a few steps behind.
"Now, Jack, listen up," Reid pointed at the T. rex fossil skeleton on display. "We humans didn't eat T. rex, because when T. rex lumbered the Earth, we humans hadn't been invented yet. We were still little wormy shrew-like creatures, skittering into our holes whenever the lizard king came to rule over his forest."
"We were worms?" Jack asked curiously.
"Uh no, our ancestors were wormy shrew-like creatures," Reid wrinkled his nose and sniffed in a shrew-like manner. "They were teeny-tiny before they evolved to be big like us and other mammals."
"And smart like us?" Jack asked.
"Good job, Jack!" Reid was impressed with the miniman's discernment, "Little wormy shrews evolved to be big and smart like us humans."
"Human," Henry poked his fingers into Reid's ear.
"No touchy ear!" Reid guided the fingers away from his head. "Now, what stories do I know about T. rex?" he thought back to all the tyrannosaur-related articles that he had consumed in the "Journal of Paleontological Morbidity and Mortality".
The dark-haired boy hid behind a glass display case as he watched the man and the two younger boys. He fingered the small sharp knife hidden in one of the pockets of his many-pocketed fishing vest. He peeked around the display case every time the group came within earshot as it circled the T. rex. He listened to the man tell his stories about how T. rex, though feared and revered in our eyes as a superpredator, may have actually been a full-time scavenger, an animal that fed exclusively on prey hunted down by smaller predators that it intimidated with its superior size and strength.
The man's stories fascinated the boy. The man's voice entranced him, feeding a hunger that yearned to be acknowledged. The boy wanted to know more about the tyrannosaurs. He wanted to know everything there was to know about them, and he wanted the man to tell him the stories in his soft melodious voice.
In order to have the man all to himself, the boy would have to get rid of the other two, the two little brats who hung onto the man as if he belonged to them. The man did not belong to the brats. The man belonged to the boy. The boy seethed with jealousy at the sight of the man holding the smaller brat, bodily, in one arm, while holding the hand of the larger brat. The boy wanted to rip the smaller brat out of the man's arm and bash his head against the T. rex until his brains splattered all over the fossilized bones. He wanted to lure the larger brat to the second floor of the museum, where he would push him over the railing, waving and yipping as the brat crashed down upon the woolly mammoth below. The brat would bounce off the display and smack his head open against the marble floor. The boy couldn't wait to see it happen. Afterwards, when the brats had been gotten rid of, the boy would tell Daddy that the man had seen Daddy and Daddy's friends smuggling away precious fossils in the dead of night, and Daddy, fearing that the man would tell the police, would help the boy net the man to keep him silent. From then on, the boy and the man would become the best of friends, and they would spend their days and nights together, the man telling his stories and the boy absorbing them like a lowly sponge yearning to evolve into an enlightened human.
The boy sat down on a bench in a dark corner, where he observed the man and the brats conversing over the stegosaur. From the looks of it, the group was planning to spend the whole day at the museum. The boy was pleased. At closing time, he would find a way to trick the group into the restroom. He would lock them in with his master key. If he were lucky, he would find a way to separate the man and the brats. The brats would meet their ends, quietly, without the fanfare of splattering their brains over fossilized bones or marble floors. The man would meet a new beginning.
The boy wondered what he would name the man. He considered naming the man after himself, but he decided against it, not wanting to indulge in such narcissistic behavior. Narcissicism was a condition that he had read about in a book, one of the many books that he read each day, and he did not wish to be associated with it. He decided to name the man after his father. He had read, in another book, that it was right to honor thy father and thy mother. He would call the man "Billy" for short.
Master Post