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Description
My name is James McCarthy. I have an IQ (or so they say) of 168. I talked to my doctor about this inflated number, to which he coughed and said that I was lucky enough to think for myself in this kind of world. Even with my so called 'smarts', I didn't really understand what he was insinuating. High IQ or not, I suppose I'm just too young to grasp adult insinuations. I guess my age has a factor in everything I do, anyway.

I attend Grade 9 at Rosalie Parks Elementary and Junior High School, refusing to be projected rapidly through my classes and in to high school prematurely. I wanted to keep the friendships I had managed to create, and I felt that it would alienate them if I was accelerated beyond their level of comprehension.  Nobody in grade 9 really understands 'High School', and I wanted to experience it with them, instead of alone and under age. My teachers regard me with that special smile reserved for children who they feel they can actually reach; the ones who don't throw spitballs or crack jokes. The ones who actually listen and learn. Apparently we're a rare and dying breed. Which brings me to my next observation.

I have a dinosaur, in my basement. A living, breathing dinosaur - V. mongoliensis to be specific. Or, for those who don't know what that means, a velociraptor. I haven't told anybody about this. I don't know if I can, or if I should. I don't know what they would do to him if word got out that a thirteen year old boy in a backwards, backwoods town so far from a major city that they had to build a Walmart in between us and them, just to accommodate, had successfully created an extinct species. In his basement. Without a degree, or even a lab coat to casually swish aside while answering complicated questions, or coming up with theories regarding strings and black holes and extra terrestrials. Just an average kid who still got skinned knees and didn't look at girls.

It's complicated, how this all came to be. Everyone by now, I am assuming, has seen Jurassic Park. Well, I had too. My mother had gone out one evening with a man I couldn't stand and I, deemed bright enough not to leave the oven on, was left alone. I popped the movie in to the DVD player and settled in to be amazed. I've always felt akin to dinosaurs. Their leathery skin, their complicated teeth, their tails, necks and what I imagined was their musky, earthy scent. I wanted to BE one. I felt like I was picking apart the movie, though, as I watched them explain their oh-so-complicated method for cloning a dinosaur from tree sap and mosquitoes. I figured there were diagnostics that just wouldn't cut it going on there, and felt I could do better. Or at least prove them completely wrong. I just needed some sap and a few needles and my basement. I could do that.

Before my mother and father were married and had me, and long before he "walked out with that hussy", as my mother likes to say, he worked in a museum. More specifically, he worked with the accumulated cast off bones, not enough to create full skeletons, of dinosaurs and ice age mammals which piled up in the back rooms. Side by side with budding anthropologists and paleontologists, he instructed on their care, how to package them, how to wrap them delicately in the white plaster strips and set them in crates and boxes, ready for storage or hauling to a different museum. My father, the wily devil, had snuck out some of the smaller bones, a 'finger' here, a 'toe' there. Some teeth, and some glossy chunks of amber, complete with various bugs and leaves. He used them as his book ends, and he had left them when he left us. They were my first priority. I was going to prove the movie wrong, and my journey would start in my fathers dusty study.

My bedroom is in the basement. Actually, I have pretty much a free reign on anything below the living room and kitchen. I've covered the walls with shelves which I hastily created when I was in my 'hands on' phase last year. Looking at them now, with what I like to consider a far more critical eye, I see where I could have done better. But they have done what they were created to do. They hold countless books, from fantasy stories to thrillers to romance novels, and the shelf which I found myself pouring over in that surreal moment before using a power tool in my backyard – the science shelf. I had books dating back a hundred years sitting there, collecting dust. Hard spines and wispy paper, a complete collection of butterfly species (also from my hands on phase. I figured I'd be renown as a collector, but I got bored). And a big, heavy tome on scientific experiments, which included cloning. Flipping through the pages, I found that I'd need a host. Something to carry the DNA once I'd extracted it from its shell. I eyed up our dog, Shelly, but ruled her out eventually. She was seventy six in dog years. I figured that would be like my grandmother deciding on a newborn baby; too old. Sifting through my collection of oddities, I found a telescope, some petri dishes and a light meant to warm chicken eggs when the mother rejected them. I also found the stomach of an old goat, distended and softened with water which my father had been so proud of. "You can drink water from this," I remember him saying. "We filled it, preserved it, and created it specifically for that purpose when the goat passed on." I was skeptical, but finally concluded that either the baby dinosaur (which surely wouldn't come to life anyway) would either live in the stomach, or in a petri dish, and I'm sure that I appreciated the idea of having a stomach for a home for my first weeks and months of life. And so would it.

I know you're probably just waiting for me to get to the dinosaur. You want to know all about him, and I don't blame you. But I really feel that I must fill you in on the surrounding events of that day. Honestly, I didn't expect my summer vacation to start out like it did. The last day of school was overcast, threatening rain. My mom forgot to pick me up, and if you've ever lived in a town that consists mainly of farm land and dogs that howl well in to the wee hours of the morning, you know what kind of a walk that was for me. I don't blame her, didn't blame her. Won't blame her. She's been preoccupied with work, and with this boyfriend of hers. His name is Tim, but I'd rather call him other names I'm not allowed to yet. He picks her up in his ratty '67 Chevy Impala and they tour the town like they are sixteen and not forty and forty three respectively, smoking cheap cigarettes and listening to bad music. I had a whole list of things I was going to do for the next two months, I had some movies I wanted to see badly. Old classic horror movies with Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. I was thinking of how deliciously bad "Attack of the Giant Leeches" would be with a greasy bowl of popcorn at 2 am, Shelly curled around my feet. I stopped at the local store to rent it and instead I ended up with the life changing "Jurassic Park". And instead of popcorn it was macaroni and cheese at 8:30 pm with pop tarts, and the dog was nowhere to be found. No matter though. This was just day one – I had at least forty more.

Halfway through my movie, if you recall, I stumbled in to my fathers study and then in to the basement. I lugged down the heavy amber 'bookends', assembled my mothers diabetic needles in a neat line on a table, and blew dust off an old power drill. Not for one moment had I figured I was ruining gorgeous specimens from a time period we'd never see again. I opted out of the backyard idea, deciding instead to drill in to them right there in my 'laboratory'. I botched the first piece of amber, drilling too far and severing the tiny head from the mosquito. I was more careful with the second piece. If I screwed it up, I wouldn't be able to continue my experiment. Delicately, I drilled as slowly as possible, and ended up with a tubular hole directly over the bloated body of the millions of years old bug. I felt like cheering, but didn't believe that would be very scientific of me. I contemplated my next step for a good half an hour, juggling a needle from one hand to the next, debating. Did I just stick it right in there, and hope I didn't suck up a bunch of dust? Did I add some water to it first to lubricate the mosquito, then drain it all back out with the hope that some bloody DNA was still preserved somewhere in there? I went with option two.

I realized somewhere along the line that I would need an egg. Since I had nothing readily available, except for eggs in the refrigerator, I decided to wait until the morning for the next part of my experiment. I would go down to the pond and skim the surface for frogs eggs. Generally, they laid them in sweeping batches on the top of the water, under fronds and flowers. I was awake at 6am, earlier then I got up even for school, and out the door fifteen minutes later, a specimen jar tucked under my arm. I ran the distance between our house and the ravine behind it quickly, listening to the wildlife awaken. I skidded to a halt at the edge of the pond, my eyes searching for the slimy bubble eggs. I found some underneath a mossy log and slid the specimen jar across it, watching the goop slide to the bottom with a plop. I grinned, screwed the top on, and was back in my basement by a quarter to seven, patting myself on the back for a job well done. My exceptional foresight. My excellent idea. I was even mentally composing the paper which would make me famous – "Thirteen year old boy from Alberta clones dinosaur from frog eggs, stating; 'I knew it would work all along!'" Nowhere in my brain did the idea that those eggs were already fertilized come up. I guess being really smart has its downfalls when you're really excited about something.

To make a long story short, the eggs weren't fertilized. But before I knew that, I boiled some water in the kitchen, grabbed a chicken egg from the refrigerator, and carried both things to the basement in Tupperware containers. Using a pin, I carved out a small hole in the bottom of the egg and used a needle to inject some of the warm water in to the cavity of the shell. Then came the tricky part. I wasn't sure exactly how to get the DNA in to the frogs eggs, and I felt incredibly stupid as I sat on a chair and stared at the jars, amber, needles and warming lights scattered on my table. I guess, I thought, I'll just do whatever comes to mind, because it's not going to work anyway. I figured it would need food, some kind of sustenance while it was in the shell, so I pricked my finger and let a few drops of blood ooze their way in to the yolk, then flicked on the warming light and placed the egg beneath it. Hesitantly, I scooped some of the gooey frog eggs in to a spoon and held it as steady as possible in front of me, and valiantly attempted to inject what I had extracted from the mosquito in to them. They slid around the metal, mocking me, preventing the tiny tip of the syringe to enter them and causing a lot of it to slide off on to my lap. Eventually, I gave up and spooned the slop in to the hole on the bottom of the egg, then released what was left in the needle on top of it. I closed it with silly putty, laid it down under the light again, and stared really, really hard at the goat stomach.

"Come on," you're thinking. "Hurry up, I want to hear about the velociraptor." I know you do. But if you were thirteen and just figured out how to create a dinosaur, you'd want to go in to great detail as to how you did it. I figure if it grows up, and eats me, I won't be able to document it any better then I could now, while I'm still alive. So, back to the goat stomach. With some help from a diagram of the human anatomy, and some well worded passages in a medical journal, I created inside of that worn out and slightly disgusting stomach a little home for my egg. I cut it up, that much is true, because really, I didn't think my Dad would be back any time soon to collect it. And this was in the name of science, after all. I used a needle and thread to stitch it up in to a smaller version of the big, bloated stomach, and added more of the water (which had to be reheated by this time) to keep it supple. Before closing it up, I gently inserted the chicken egg, filled with slimy frog eggs and dusty DNA strands and human blood, and sewed it up, leaving gaps for air to circulate through it, as well as a hole to add more water if needed. I stood back, proud of myself and my freshly created, fertile environment. Grabbing an old Easter basket from a shelf, some rope and a little blanket, I crafted a makeshift 'bed' and suspended it from the beams in the ceiling, propping the warming lamp over it with some duct tape. And then, well. Then I completely forgot about it.

July melted in to August, and my mother and her boyfriend Tim melted in to my mother and a man named Scott, then Jeffery, and then an old farmer who just went by 'Mutts' who frequented the convenience store, smoking home grown tobacco. My dad wrote twice, once from Alaska where he had gone on a survey expedition to document some kind of endangered bird, and once from California where he got to speak at a podium about the same bird to a bunch of young adults. My egg basket was still forgotten, hanging from the ceiling in the basement. I didn't watch any of the movies I had meticulously listed off in a notebook, didn't eat any popcorn. Instead, I got involved with a girl named Susie and wrote her awkward poetry in the shade of an elm tree behind my house. I got a sunburn, I outgrew two pairs of shoes, and my jeans. In other words, a completely normal teenage summer, nothing a genius should experience. By chance, one day, as I was looking through my shelves outside my bedroom for a sappy book which might teach me to kiss better, I happened to glance up and notice the pink, tacky basket swaying gently on the rafters. For a moment, I couldn't place it, and then remembered with some embarrassment what it was. Ah, what the heck, I thought. I'll check on it. And Susie was instantly forgotten.

I'm not sure what did it. I don't know if it was the eggs themselves, or...the lamp? I don't know. But there, in the little 'stomach', was a fetus. It was progressing rapidly, I thought, though nobody really knows how fast a dinosaur grew. It was curled up, like a bird embryo, but it had broken free of the delicate egg shell and was expanding in the pliable goat stomach. Its eyes were closed, a thin sheet of skin over bulging black peas, it seemed to me. The veins just underneath the skin were still visible. I wasn't sure if I should throw up or make a great, whooping 'yahoo' from the bottom of my stomach, clapping my hands together and doing a jig to go along with it. It had a tail, and two tiny arms with the palms twisted inward. I scratched my head, eyes roaming over the little body. What kind of dinosaur was this, or was it going to be a deformed chicken, a fowl with a tail, squawking and shrieking and eventually dying of its own stupidity? I gently lifted the basket down with the light, still on and still functioning even after a month and a half. Excellent technology, those warming lights. I lifted the blanket I had laid over the egg and stared in awe at the muscular legs which ended in flat, awkward looking feet. Each of those feet had a sickle shaped claw, gleaming in the fluid left in the sack, reflecting the light from the lamp. Ominously.

I should have told somebody then, but I honestly didn't think it would continue to grow. Another week passed, then half of one more. The little dinosaur had burst free of its confines by this time, and rolled idiotically around in the basket, making little chirping noises and lolling its head from side to side. I should have thought this far ahead, should have realized that it might be the blood of ANY kind of dinosaur in that mosquito. I did a lot of research in that week and a half at the local library. I read everything I possibly could on velociraptors. Carnivores, lethal, smart. Fast, cunning, wily. Possibly covered in feathers. The little reptile in my basket at home didn't have feathers, I thought. Just slick, oily hide and a stupid expression. Often, now, it would have its sharp tongue poking out of the side of its mouth, like a dog. It liked me, I thought. I know now that he did, but then, I didn't know what to think. He had escaped the basket by this time and considered my bedroom and the surrounding area his territory, and I'd named him Puck. He consisted mainly on apples and scrambled eggs – I might be smart, but I didn't know how to hunt rabbits or cook anything more complicated, so he got what I got. Shelly wasn't allowed in the basement any more, and my mother took that as a sign of puberty. I wanted to be alone, to do whatever it was boys my age did, she figured. I highly doubt that she considered the idea that I might want to be alone to examine and raise a dinosaur.

Puck grew like a weed. He was like the patch of dandelions in the backyard of my house that refused to be dug up, and every time we ran over it with the lawnmower or pulled it out by its roots, it grew back twice as big. He graduated from scrambled eggs and apples to bread, fish caught in the creek, and whatever I could dig out of our garden. I stayed away from meat as much as possible with him. I had decided that if he got the taste for it, other than fish, he'd probably want to gnaw at my skull and chew on my limbs. I didn't want to die, but you have to admit – having a dinosaur as a pet is probably every young persons dream. I didn't want to give him up, yet I wanted to try to retrain his natural instincts for meat in to something a little less...deadly. He was my alarm clock, he was my one basic chore. Cleaning up after him became something like owning a horse. He'd leave big piles of excrement laying around everywhere, but he'd never go in the bed, which was nice of him. He'd nuzzle me awake every morning, looking in my armpits and under the sheet for something to eat. I found he drank very little water, didn't seem to need hydration like us humans do. Puck was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me, and I made him.

The first day of school was the first time I had to be away from him since he stopped lolling and thrashing in the basket. He came up to my knee, and he liked to flex his 2 inch sickle claws, pleased when they clacked off the cement floor. He wasn't very big, and I felt ripped off by Jurassic Park, even though deep down I knew that he wouldn't be exactly the same. He acted like a little, scaly dog. He'd follow me everywhere I went whenever I was in the basement, begging for food, learning little tricks like lay down, play dead and roll over. Suffice to say, with the first day of school, I didn't know what to do. I had to go, But there was Puck, gently pleading with me not to leave from the bottom of the stairs, making agitated chirping noises and clicking his teeth together. I feel it should be mentioned that his teeth were very dull, and he didn't seem to have the excess of them that a skeleton in a museum would have. Maybe twenty at the most, but with his accelerated growth, which still came as a surprise whenever I thought about it, I assumed he should have more. It was like he hit a wall, and started aging backwards instead of forwards as it should be. In the last few days, his little forearms shook, his tail drooped, and he slept most of the time. It was like I had a little old man as a roommate. A little old man who could probably kill me if he wanted to.

I went to school that day. I locked the basement door, trudged off to the bus stop and sat through my classes as if it were any other day, the exception being that I had a prehistoric animal in my basement. Two or three weeks passed, and Puck missed me a lot, it seems. He was very happy to see me when I returned home from school that first day, resigned that I would leave the next. My story has a pretty anti-climatic ending, though. And kind of sad, when you think about it.  The first day of the fourth week, he didn't get up to see me off, and I should have known something was wrong, but...I had to go. He passed away somewhere between home room and math, I think. I came home to find his little body curled around my pillow, claws digging in to the soft fabric, tail tip touching his nose. I think I cried, but I can't remember now. I buried him out near the pond, where he had technically been conceived, later that evening.

Would I do it again? I don't know. I've asked myself that question countless times in the last few months since Puck's death. I don't think so, though. I changed my career goal from scientist to something that has to do with computers. Websites, or some such, so I'll never have to make a decision involving DNA, dinosaurs, cloning, and what have you. My mother was surprised, but then again...she didn't know there was a velociraptor in her basement for two months during my grade nine summer vacation, now did she?

Description
My name is James McCarthy. I have an IQ (or so they say) of 168. I talked to my doctor about this inflated number, to which he coughed and said that I was lucky enough to think for myself in this kind of world. Even with my so called 'smarts', I didn't really understand what he was insinuating. High IQ or not, I suppose I'm just too young to grasp adult insinuations. I guess my age has a factor in everything I do, anyway.

I attend Grade 9 at Rosalie Parks Elementary and Junior High School, refusing to be projected rapidly through my classes and in to high school prematurely. I wanted to keep the friendships I had managed to create, and I felt that it would alienate them if I was accelerated beyond their level of comprehension.  Nobody in grade 9 really understands 'High School', and I wanted to experience it with them, instead of alone and under age. My teachers regard me with that special smile reserved for children who they feel they can actually reach; the ones who don't throw spitballs or crack jokes. The ones who actually listen and learn. Apparently we're a rare and dying breed. Which brings me to my next observation.

I have a dinosaur, in my basement. A living, breathing dinosaur - V. mongoliensis to be specific. Or, for those who don't know what that means, a velociraptor. I haven't told anybody about this. I don't know if I can, or if I should. I don't know what they would do to him if word got out that a thirteen year old boy in a backwards, backwoods town so far from a major city that they had to build a Walmart in between us and them, just to accommodate, had successfully created an extinct species. In his basement. Without a degree, or even a lab coat to casually swish aside while answering complicated questions, or coming up with theories regarding strings and black holes and extra terrestrials. Just an average kid who still got skinned knees and didn't look at girls.

It's complicated, how this all came to be. Everyone by now, I am assuming, has seen Jurassic Park. Well, I had too. My mother had gone out one evening with a man I couldn't stand and I, deemed bright enough not to leave the oven on, was left alone. I popped the movie in to the DVD player and settled in to be amazed. I've always felt akin to dinosaurs. Their leathery skin, their complicated teeth, their tails, necks and what I imagined was their musky, earthy scent. I wanted to BE one. I felt like I was picking apart the movie, though, as I watched them explain their oh-so-complicated method for cloning a dinosaur from tree sap and mosquitoes. I figured there were diagnostics that just wouldn't cut it going on there, and felt I could do better. Or at least prove them completely wrong. I just needed some sap and a few needles and my basement. I could do that.

Before my mother and father were married and had me, and long before he "walked out with that hussy", as my mother likes to say, he worked in a museum. More specifically, he worked with the accumulated cast off bones, not enough to create full skeletons, of dinosaurs and ice age mammals which piled up in the back rooms. Side by side with budding anthropologists and paleontologists, he instructed on their care, how to package them, how to wrap them delicately in the white plaster strips and set them in crates and boxes, ready for storage or hauling to a different museum. My father, the wily devil, had snuck out some of the smaller bones, a 'finger' here, a 'toe' there. Some teeth, and some glossy chunks of amber, complete with various bugs and leaves. He used them as his book ends, and he had left them when he left us. They were my first priority. I was going to prove the movie wrong, and my journey would start in my fathers dusty study.

My bedroom is in the basement. Actually, I have pretty much a free reign on anything below the living room and kitchen. I've covered the walls with shelves which I hastily created when I was in my 'hands on' phase last year. Looking at them now, with what I like to consider a far more critical eye, I see where I could have done better. But they have done what they were created to do. They hold countless books, from fantasy stories to thrillers to romance novels, and the shelf which I found myself pouring over in that surreal moment before using a power tool in my backyard – the science shelf. I had books dating back a hundred years sitting there, collecting dust. Hard spines and wispy paper, a complete collection of butterfly species (also from my hands on phase. I figured I'd be renown as a collector, but I got bored). And a big, heavy tome on scientific experiments, which included cloning. Flipping through the pages, I found that I'd need a host. Something to carry the DNA once I'd extracted it from its shell. I eyed up our dog, Shelly, but ruled her out eventually. She was seventy six in dog years. I figured that would be like my grandmother deciding on a newborn baby; too old. Sifting through my collection of oddities, I found a telescope, some petri dishes and a light meant to warm chicken eggs when the mother rejected them. I also found the stomach of an old goat, distended and softened with water which my father had been so proud of. "You can drink water from this," I remember him saying. "We filled it, preserved it, and created it specifically for that purpose when the goat passed on." I was skeptical, but finally concluded that either the baby dinosaur (which surely wouldn't come to life anyway) would either live in the stomach, or in a petri dish, and I'm sure that I appreciated the idea of having a stomach for a home for my first weeks and months of life. And so would it.

I know you're probably just waiting for me to get to the dinosaur. You want to know all about him, and I don't blame you. But I really feel that I must fill you in on the surrounding events of that day. Honestly, I didn't expect my summer vacation to start out like it did. The last day of school was overcast, threatening rain. My mom forgot to pick me up, and if you've ever lived in a town that consists mainly of farm land and dogs that howl well in to the wee hours of the morning, you know what kind of a walk that was for me. I don't blame her, didn't blame her. Won't blame her. She's been preoccupied with work, and with this boyfriend of hers. His name is Tim, but I'd rather call him other names I'm not allowed to yet. He picks her up in his ratty '67 Chevy Impala and they tour the town like they are sixteen and not forty and forty three respectively, smoking cheap cigarettes and listening to bad music. I had a whole list of things I was going to do for the next two months, I had some movies I wanted to see badly. Old classic horror movies with Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. I was thinking of how deliciously bad "Attack of the Giant Leeches" would be with a greasy bowl of popcorn at 2 am, Shelly curled around my feet. I stopped at the local store to rent it and instead I ended up with the life changing "Jurassic Park". And instead of popcorn it was macaroni and cheese at 8:30 pm with pop tarts, and the dog was nowhere to be found. No matter though. This was just day one – I had at least forty more.

Halfway through my movie, if you recall, I stumbled in to my fathers study and then in to the basement. I lugged down the heavy amber 'bookends', assembled my mothers diabetic needles in a neat line on a table, and blew dust off an old power drill. Not for one moment had I figured I was ruining gorgeous specimens from a time period we'd never see again. I opted out of the backyard idea, deciding instead to drill in to them right there in my 'laboratory'. I botched the first piece of amber, drilling too far and severing the tiny head from the mosquito. I was more careful with the second piece. If I screwed it up, I wouldn't be able to continue my experiment. Delicately, I drilled as slowly as possible, and ended up with a tubular hole directly over the bloated body of the millions of years old bug. I felt like cheering, but didn't believe that would be very scientific of me. I contemplated my next step for a good half an hour, juggling a needle from one hand to the next, debating. Did I just stick it right in there, and hope I didn't suck up a bunch of dust? Did I add some water to it first to lubricate the mosquito, then drain it all back out with the hope that some bloody DNA was still preserved somewhere in there? I went with option two.

I realized somewhere along the line that I would need an egg. Since I had nothing readily available, except for eggs in the refrigerator, I decided to wait until the morning for the next part of my experiment. I would go down to the pond and skim the surface for frogs eggs. Generally, they laid them in sweeping batches on the top of the water, under fronds and flowers. I was awake at 6am, earlier then I got up even for school, and out the door fifteen minutes later, a specimen jar tucked under my arm. I ran the distance between our house and the ravine behind it quickly, listening to the wildlife awaken. I skidded to a halt at the edge of the pond, my eyes searching for the slimy bubble eggs. I found some underneath a mossy log and slid the specimen jar across it, watching the goop slide to the bottom with a plop. I grinned, screwed the top on, and was back in my basement by a quarter to seven, patting myself on the back for a job well done. My exceptional foresight. My excellent idea. I was even mentally composing the paper which would make me famous – "Thirteen year old boy from Alberta clones dinosaur from frog eggs, stating; 'I knew it would work all along!'" Nowhere in my brain did the idea that those eggs were already fertilized come up. I guess being really smart has its downfalls when you're really excited about something.

To make a long story short, the eggs weren't fertilized. But before I knew that, I boiled some water in the kitchen, grabbed a chicken egg from the refrigerator, and carried both things to the basement in Tupperware containers. Using a pin, I carved out a small hole in the bottom of the egg and used a needle to inject some of the warm water in to the cavity of the shell. Then came the tricky part. I wasn't sure exactly how to get the DNA in to the frogs eggs, and I felt incredibly stupid as I sat on a chair and stared at the jars, amber, needles and warming lights scattered on my table. I guess, I thought, I'll just do whatever comes to mind, because it's not going to work anyway. I figured it would need food, some kind of sustenance while it was in the shell, so I pricked my finger and let a few drops of blood ooze their way in to the yolk, then flicked on the warming light and placed the egg beneath it. Hesitantly, I scooped some of the gooey frog eggs in to a spoon and held it as steady as possible in front of me, and valiantly attempted to inject what I had extracted from the mosquito in to them. They slid around the metal, mocking me, preventing the tiny tip of the syringe to enter them and causing a lot of it to slide off on to my lap. Eventually, I gave up and spooned the slop in to the hole on the bottom of the egg, then released what was left in the needle on top of it. I closed it with silly putty, laid it down under the light again, and stared really, really hard at the goat stomach.

"Come on," you're thinking. "Hurry up, I want to hear about the velociraptor." I know you do. But if you were thirteen and just figured out how to create a dinosaur, you'd want to go in to great detail as to how you did it. I figure if it grows up, and eats me, I won't be able to document it any better then I could now, while I'm still alive. So, back to the goat stomach. With some help from a diagram of the human anatomy, and some well worded passages in a medical journal, I created inside of that worn out and slightly disgusting stomach a little home for my egg. I cut it up, that much is true, because really, I didn't think my Dad would be back any time soon to collect it. And this was in the name of science, after all. I used a needle and thread to stitch it up in to a smaller version of the big, bloated stomach, and added more of the water (which had to be reheated by this time) to keep it supple. Before closing it up, I gently inserted the chicken egg, filled with slimy frog eggs and dusty DNA strands and human blood, and sewed it up, leaving gaps for air to circulate through it, as well as a hole to add more water if needed. I stood back, proud of myself and my freshly created, fertile environment. Grabbing an old Easter basket from a shelf, some rope and a little blanket, I crafted a makeshift 'bed' and suspended it from the beams in the ceiling, propping the warming lamp over it with some duct tape. And then, well. Then I completely forgot about it.

July melted in to August, and my mother and her boyfriend Tim melted in to my mother and a man named Scott, then Jeffery, and then an old farmer who just went by 'Mutts' who frequented the convenience store, smoking home grown tobacco. My dad wrote twice, once from Alaska where he had gone on a survey expedition to document some kind of endangered bird, and once from California where he got to speak at a podium about the same bird to a bunch of young adults. My egg basket was still forgotten, hanging from the ceiling in the basement. I didn't watch any of the movies I had meticulously listed off in a notebook, didn't eat any popcorn. Instead, I got involved with a girl named Susie and wrote her awkward poetry in the shade of an elm tree behind my house. I got a sunburn, I outgrew two pairs of shoes, and my jeans. In other words, a completely normal teenage summer, nothing a genius should experience. By chance, one day, as I was looking through my shelves outside my bedroom for a sappy book which might teach me to kiss better, I happened to glance up and notice the pink, tacky basket swaying gently on the rafters. For a moment, I couldn't place it, and then remembered with some embarrassment what it was. Ah, what the heck, I thought. I'll check on it. And Susie was instantly forgotten.

I'm not sure what did it. I don't know if it was the eggs themselves, or...the lamp? I don't know. But there, in the little 'stomach', was a fetus. It was progressing rapidly, I thought, though nobody really knows how fast a dinosaur grew. It was curled up, like a bird embryo, but it had broken free of the delicate egg shell and was expanding in the pliable goat stomach. Its eyes were closed, a thin sheet of skin over bulging black peas, it seemed to me. The veins just underneath the skin were still visible. I wasn't sure if I should throw up or make a great, whooping 'yahoo' from the bottom of my stomach, clapping my hands together and doing a jig to go along with it. It had a tail, and two tiny arms with the palms twisted inward. I scratched my head, eyes roaming over the little body. What kind of dinosaur was this, or was it going to be a deformed chicken, a fowl with a tail, squawking and shrieking and eventually dying of its own stupidity? I gently lifted the basket down with the light, still on and still functioning even after a month and a half. Excellent technology, those warming lights. I lifted the blanket I had laid over the egg and stared in awe at the muscular legs which ended in flat, awkward looking feet. Each of those feet had a sickle shaped claw, gleaming in the fluid left in the sack, reflecting the light from the lamp. Ominously.

I should have told somebody then, but I honestly didn't think it would continue to grow. Another week passed, then half of one more. The little dinosaur had burst free of its confines by this time, and rolled idiotically around in the basket, making little chirping noises and lolling its head from side to side. I should have thought this far ahead, should have realized that it might be the blood of ANY kind of dinosaur in that mosquito. I did a lot of research in that week and a half at the local library. I read everything I possibly could on velociraptors. Carnivores, lethal, smart. Fast, cunning, wily. Possibly covered in feathers. The little reptile in my basket at home didn't have feathers, I thought. Just slick, oily hide and a stupid expression. Often, now, it would have its sharp tongue poking out of the side of its mouth, like a dog. It liked me, I thought. I know now that he did, but then, I didn't know what to think. He had escaped the basket by this time and considered my bedroom and the surrounding area his territory, and I'd named him Puck. He consisted mainly on apples and scrambled eggs – I might be smart, but I didn't know how to hunt rabbits or cook anything more complicated, so he got what I got. Shelly wasn't allowed in the basement any more, and my mother took that as a sign of puberty. I wanted to be alone, to do whatever it was boys my age did, she figured. I highly doubt that she considered the idea that I might want to be alone to examine and raise a dinosaur.

Puck grew like a weed. He was like the patch of dandelions in the backyard of my house that refused to be dug up, and every time we ran over it with the lawnmower or pulled it out by its roots, it grew back twice as big. He graduated from scrambled eggs and apples to bread, fish caught in the creek, and whatever I could dig out of our garden. I stayed away from meat as much as possible with him. I had decided that if he got the taste for it, other than fish, he'd probably want to gnaw at my skull and chew on my limbs. I didn't want to die, but you have to admit – having a dinosaur as a pet is probably every young persons dream. I didn't want to give him up, yet I wanted to try to retrain his natural instincts for meat in to something a little less...deadly. He was my alarm clock, he was my one basic chore. Cleaning up after him became something like owning a horse. He'd leave big piles of excrement laying around everywhere, but he'd never go in the bed, which was nice of him. He'd nuzzle me awake every morning, looking in my armpits and under the sheet for something to eat. I found he drank very little water, didn't seem to need hydration like us humans do. Puck was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me, and I made him.

The first day of school was the first time I had to be away from him since he stopped lolling and thrashing in the basket. He came up to my knee, and he liked to flex his 2 inch sickle claws, pleased when they clacked off the cement floor. He wasn't very big, and I felt ripped off by Jurassic Park, even though deep down I knew that he wouldn't be exactly the same. He acted like a little, scaly dog. He'd follow me everywhere I went whenever I was in the basement, begging for food, learning little tricks like lay down, play dead and roll over. Suffice to say, with the first day of school, I didn't know what to do. I had to go, But there was Puck, gently pleading with me not to leave from the bottom of the stairs, making agitated chirping noises and clicking his teeth together. I feel it should be mentioned that his teeth were very dull, and he didn't seem to have the excess of them that a skeleton in a museum would have. Maybe twenty at the most, but with his accelerated growth, which still came as a surprise whenever I thought about it, I assumed he should have more. It was like he hit a wall, and started aging backwards instead of forwards as it should be. In the last few days, his little forearms shook, his tail drooped, and he slept most of the time. It was like I had a little old man as a roommate. A little old man who could probably kill me if he wanted to.

I went to school that day. I locked the basement door, trudged off to the bus stop and sat through my classes as if it were any other day, the exception being that I had a prehistoric animal in my basement. Two or three weeks passed, and Puck missed me a lot, it seems. He was very happy to see me when I returned home from school that first day, resigned that I would leave the next. My story has a pretty anti-climatic ending, though. And kind of sad, when you think about it.  The first day of the fourth week, he didn't get up to see me off, and I should have known something was wrong, but...I had to go. He passed away somewhere between home room and math, I think. I came home to find his little body curled around my pillow, claws digging in to the soft fabric, tail tip touching his nose. I think I cried, but I can't remember now. I buried him out near the pond, where he had technically been conceived, later that evening.

Would I do it again? I don't know. I've asked myself that question countless times in the last few months since Puck's death. I don't think so, though. I changed my career goal from scientist to something that has to do with computers. Websites, or some such, so I'll never have to make a decision involving DNA, dinosaurs, cloning, and what have you. My mother was surprised, but then again...she didn't know there was a velociraptor in her basement for two months during my grade nine summer vacation, now did she?