The Name Of The Buyer Was Not Disclosed
The representative from the auction house made him feel stupid for thinking it would appear at his compound intact, as it first had walked this land some eighty million years ago.
“A robust skeleton of a Gorgosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus rex relative that roamed the Earth about 80 million years ago, sold at a Sotheby’s auction on Thursday for $6.1 million.” - New York Times, July 28, 2022
Here is the CEO down on his knees in the anteroom of his estate, surrounded by many bones strewn around him, with some in neat stacks, others sort-of scattered, like dominoes that fell before they were supposed to, and, honestly, he didn’t think they’d send the Gorgosaurus in its segments at all and he knew he was truly fucked when the movers carried in numbered cardboard boxes, so much so that he actually called the auction house directly, failing to tip the movers anything while the representative from the auction house made him feel stupid for thinking it would appear at his compound intact, as it first had walked this land some eighty million years ago, leading to several childish outbursts by the CEO over the phone, which leaves him alone and too proud to ask or wait for an expert, so he tears in at random, easily assembling the jaws and toes which he props up with the gnashing head resting on the feet, but the problem arises with the spine and the ribs which are all curved such that they reminded him of the xylophone bars illustrated on children’s alphabet diagrams, but when he hits them with his knuckles one by one, they all sound the same to him so he starts looking at the promotional photographs taken of the skeleton standing at the auction house, but it doesn’t help him see these bones before him in any pattern or shape, yet still the CEO works awhile at it, holding this and that up, trying to pattern it out across the marble floor, working awfully hard and getting proud at how far along he’s come in raising it all up, that he had the foresight to buy the dinosaur at all, and the CEO backs up to see it in all its presence, its ancient silhouette filling an entire plaster wall, and he does not have small walls in his anteroom, and while he steps back, his heel catches part of a Gorgosaurs hand and he falls rig over kettle and into the mouth of the waiting beast, hollering for some time until one of his listening devices finally hears him and sends for help, but it’s a long drive up to the compound, and when they arrive the officials find the CEO upside down stuck halfway through the throat of a dinosaur he’s recently paid several million dollars just for the right to name himself, and they’re reporting to the coroner that it looks like his attempts to get out have only tightened the jaws around him, that the teeth are still sharp enough after millenia to rip off several red bits of tender CEO, and they say in their reports that it smells sour in the anteroom, and they don’t think it could be the bones, no, it cannot be them, not the bones at all.
Avery Gregurich is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River, and has never strayed too far from it.
