WARNING: This is NOT a Costume- A Short Story

• This story and (much to the dismay of my parents) many more like it, can be found following this link right here. Go on, click it. This one. Violent absurdism awaits!

“I don't think your secretary likes me."

"Look Cliff, this has got to stop."

Dan Isaac was all business. Or rather, as all business as one can be while leaning nervously away from a negotiating table. While it may be true that he was trying desperately to disguise it as an attempt at levity and relaxation, there's just no way of selling that lie realistically when the client sitting across from you is a giant purple dinosaur with a mouthful of teeth so disturbing that they gave Lil Wayne a run for his money. And while it's difficult to blame anyone in this situation, one can't help but form the opinion that Dan was a complete idiot for getting himself into something like this.

Then again, he was an agent.

Most hear "Purple Dinosaur" and think of a man in a foam costume, a creeper hidden in plain sight, or even worse- a fraud. It’s what he’d first thought when he got the call once Cliff had learned to use a telephone, and he’d almost shut the dinosaur down before even admitting to a meeting. But then he heard the voice of his mother ringing in his head: “You dumb bitch,” she would’ve said. “Do your damn job.” and he decided to hear out this potential client who was clearly insane in his repeated insistence that he was an actual dinosaur. Thank god for generational trauma and terrible parents. 

See, the problem was that Dan wasn't exactly the elite agent he'd always hoped to be, as his attempts to make a mark had always wound up falling into the categories of signing clients who were more irrational than a rabid chimpanzee. Time and time again, he wound up representing people who seemed perfectly ordinary only for the news to break that they’d accidentally stuck a small stuntman in a woodchipper or ran around like a somehow more rapey version of Michael Jackson. The devastation to his credibility had been intense, but gradually over the course of 20 years in the god-forsaken industry he'd become known as a bit of a specialist, someone who could handle and get jobs for those problem clients known to the masses as "complete idiots" or “abject human monsters”. 

His was a productivity and success born of outright grittiness and a complete failure to understand when he was more than a little over his head and devoid of a moral compass.

As for Cliff...well back in the early days of his relationship with Dan, Cliff had actually been a titan in the industry, the George Clooney of reptiles who starred in everything from horror movies to children’s toothpaste commercials. His fame had only grown and he thought he reached his peak when women were having him sign their breasts, a practice that had to be stopped once he accidentally hacked off a titty with a claw after dropping his pen. It’d been tabloid fodder for a few weeks and only seemed to amplify his bad boy image, something he relished as it reminded him of his heroes: James Dean and Paula Deen.

But things were different now and times were tough. His last two movies had not only flopped, they'd been mired in controversies that had since rendered America's favorite monster borderline unhireable, resulting in his placement in low-budget sequels that should never have been made. Gone were the life-changing and genre-altering offers of James Bond and Mr. Darcy, the lengthy voicemails from Quentin Tarantino which were flattering even if they mostly included questions about his shoe size, vanished into the night like stars in the day (which, coincidentally, was the title of his autobiography).

Don’t overthink it. It makes perfect sense and if you disagree, you just don’t understand art. 

The point is, this was a very dark time for Cliff. And as 

was usually the case in Cliff's most recent dark times, controversy quickly followed. 

First P.E.T.A. got involved, trying to say he was being treated unfairly and abused as per the Endangered Species Act. Then the Civil Rights advocates got involved when Cliff complained about being treated like an animal and drew parallels to slavery, a shrewd business strategy that was only shrewd if the word was redefined to mean ‘Ill-advised and woefully stupid’. Both served as titanic blows to Cliff’s Deanian status, pushing him closer and closer to that fine line that separated ‘Bad Boy’ from ‘Unloveable Asshat’. And with each little shove, his little dark spots grew larger and larger to the point that Dan was forced to wonder if he’d made a mistake.

Then there was the last shoe that fell. A big shoe. And it hovered over everyone like a dead person drifting to the ground with a parachute.

See, there was this little matter of cast members who just so happened to go missing on the sets of his last several films. They’d show up for work, do their thing and then poof- just like that, they were gone. What had once been a by-the-numbers life on set became a shadowy who-dunnit, with everyone from craft service to the cinematographers wondering what was really going on. Even the weathered Hollywood Veterans, the ones who’d been chewed up and spat out by the system, thought the new normal was terrifying. And while he could be considered a vet, Cliff wasn't normal. 

Why? Because Cliff was a fucking dinosaur. And there's just no getting around that.

But that didn’t mean there wasn’t hope.

Dan knew the way of things in Hollywood. He knew the ins-and-outs. He knew what would be overlooked by a fan-base and what would be seized upon and devoured by everything from tabloids to soccer moms. He knew that drug-addled actors would, in the grand scheme of things, never really be missed should they wander off during a shoot and fail to return. He even knew some fairly straightforward stars who most would just as soon see dead. Some days, however, he just couldn't settle on a course of action. Sometimes those annoying little disappearances just want to come back and bite you in the most uncomfortable places with the savagery of a pitbull on meth. 

Especially when the missing cast members always seemed to be small children.                                            

***

"Seriously man, what's going on with you?" Dan asked. “Are you good or what?”

Cliff’s eyes held a manic edge that could either have been due to drug use or the whole ‘killer dinosaur’ thing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dan,” he said in his moderately midwest accent. 

“Cliff...buddy...you know you can talk to me,” he said. “We’ve been through hell together.”

“Seems unlikely,” said Cliff, who’d never been a big fan of theology. They never seemed to cast his kind in a good light and he remained eternally offended by the fact that Jesus was never shown in a more scaly form.

“Look, man. I don’t know how to say this but we need to talk,” he said.

"Leave it alone, Dan. We can move past this." 

"If you want me to keep representing you, we can't have this discussion again. You realize that, right?" asked Dan, trying to maintain the upper hand with a client who was extremely tall yet had comically short arms. “Over and over again, it’s the same damn thing.”

Cliff had the decency to look ashamed as he bowed his head, sharp teeth bared in a saddened expression of chagrin and disgust. Or perhaps he was just hungry. Dan made a note that this was something that he should probably get around to figuring out for the sake of all his limbs, not to mention his general survival.

"I don't know, Dan," said Cliff. "Maybe I'm not cut out for this anymore. Maybe it's just all getting to be too much. The stress...the notoriety. It can eat a guy up."

Dan slammed his fist down on the table. "Bullshit!" he screamed in a textbook overreaction. It worked every time but that's mostly due to the fact that most of his clients were higher than kites at the time of their meetings. As Cliff had given up the hard stuff long ago, he simply stared at his salivating agent through reptilian eyes that just so happened to be devoid of anything remotely resembling humor or concern.

"Yes?" he said.

"When the studios were looking for a star for a Barney spin-off, did they go to a dumbass actor in a suit? No! When Roth was looking for a hardcore movie monster, did he reach for the graphics department? No, god damn it! They went for YOU!"

"That was a long time ago.”

“So was World War II but somehow we’re still talking about it!” he said. “Every god damn year it gets another Oscar. We get it! The Germans were bad! But by god, I’ll get you in one of those, too!”

Cliff didn’t deny it because he’d seen Vin Diesel in a similar role and had always thought they had about the same level of talent. “I don’t know, Dan,” he said. 

"Do you know how old Meryl Streep was when she finally won an Oscar?" Dan yelled. "Do you?"

"Meryl Streep won an Oscar?"

"Well...yeah."

"Shit."

"Irrelevant. Forget I brought it up. You've got a career left, Cliff. A long one. And there's no way I'm letting you walk out of this room without representation and a game plan. They'd eat you alive," Dan gave an inward chuckle at his choice of words, albeit a chuckle that was joined by the small ball of fear that settled in his stomach. 

Cliff itched his snout. It was the move that any absent-minded dinosaur might make. It was also an action that emphasized a row of alarming claws and reminded Dan that raised voices should probably be saved for stupid people. Stupid small people without massive tools of death attached to their hands. He scribbled it down on his notepad because his memory wasn’t what it used to be.

"You've always been fair to me," Cliff said, his voice a deep rumble as his claws trailed across the desk. "And I appreciate that, I really do. But I can't help but wonder if it's just not worth the legal trouble anymore."

"Missing children have happened before, Cliff."

"Not to this extent!"

"Every great actor runs into speed bumps..." Dan said slowly.

"Sooner or later, they're going to be looking my way."

You're a god damned dinosaur, Dan thought. How are they not looking your way?

"A valid point." he said instead, possessed of a human desire to keep his face from becoming a prop for the new Hannibal movies. "All I'm saying is there are always solutions to a given problem. We just have to find ours before you rush to a decision. We have time. We’ll always have time."

For a long moment the dinosaur only stared back across the table, and for the life of him Dan couldn't fathom what he could be thinking. He’d once tried to apply a psychiatric test to Cliff, following the advice of a certain hairless television mogul, but the results had been less than inspiring. If he were forced to relive it with any sort of poetic (yet true) flourish, he’d say that it had worked about as well as using a baby as a human shield in the face of a grenade blast. 

It was a metaphorical explosion of toddler limbs and he’d had nightmares for weeks.

“Tomorrow," Cliff said.

"Tomorrow? Tomorrow what?" Dan asked, his mind flying to several different kinds of death he'd just enlisted for. He wasn't a dour man, but there's just something about being handed a deadline by a Jurassic Theme Park Ride that is unsettling.

"I'll be back. In your office. Tomorrow. I have a gig," he said, gesturing at the solid gold clock that hung on Dan's wall. “Think up a plan and I won’t make any rash decisions before then.”

“Deal. Great clock, right?”

“Yeah,” said the dinosaur who didn’t have much knowledge when it came to the concept of time.

“It’s totally gold,” said Dan.

Well, it wasn't really gold as he never failed to tell his prospective clients. Not in the technical sense, anyway. It wasn't even gold-plated. But his third signing had asked him years ago if they'd ever be rich enough to afford it and as they were a pair of untalented Siamese twins, Dan bolstered their spirits with a good old fashioned sin of omission. It was meant to be an inspirational tactic to send them rocketing towards fame, but sadly when fame continued to elude them, Reginald (the left side) had ended his life in a haze of hallucinogenic mushroom-clouds. 

Ted followed a few days later (with a turkey baster) when he got sick of dragging his dead brother to auditions. 

Dan still refused to take the blame for any of it. It was a damn good twenty dollar clock, god dammit.

"Yeah sure. Fine," he said. "Wait. You have a gig?"

"Yeah, man," Cliff said as he rose to his feet, his tail smashing a photo of Dan's ex-wife that had accidentally fallen off the mantle following a child-support complaint. "Some kid's birthday party. What, do you think I’m made of money?"

"Well no, but is that wise?" Dan asked, mostly because it had the potential to jeopardize his client but also because he wasn't a soulless monster.

"Fuck off, Dan," he said. "I know my limits." 

          ***

I'm a soulless monster, thought Dan.

"I don't know my limits,” said the dinosaur.

"What the fuck happened, Cliff?"

The giant death machine had the decency to look ashamed. "There was a lot of food there."

"Please tell me you're talking about subs. Or burgers. Maybe a steak or a sausage or some shit like that?" he said. “Was it a potluck? Please fucking tell me it was a potluck.”

A claw scratched lazily along the desk, sending splinters flying out into empty space. "I couldn't help it, man. Their arms were like sausages on a stick,” said Cliff. “Like gooey-centered corndogs.”

Dan felt sick. Fortunately, he was used to the nausea due to his past as an enthusiastic painkiller addict.

"There's a silver lining, though," said the dinosaur.

"Oh thank god." said Dan, who was an atheist but decided that a conversion in exchange for a miracle was a fair trade.

"They're only missing one. The other is just maimed."

"What?"

"No, it's fine. They're suspecting someone else."

Dan's world was crashing down around him. Coincidentally enough, so was his faith in the human race, the LAPD's homicide unit to be specific, and his child-devouring client. 

"How in the hell do they have another suspect?"

"Fingers are pointed at the father."

"The dead kid's father?"

"No. The one who's crippled now."

Dan was a master at wordplay, a seasoned vet who'd seen it all, nothing got past him. "Sorry, I'm confused." he said, proving that it chose to go over his head instead. 

Cliff rolled his eyes. It was, Dan noticed, a terrifying thing to focus on those emotionless orbs. "The dead kid's crippled friend's dead dad." he said. "He saw me eating Curt's arm. It was going to get ugly."

“Oh god, Cliff…”

“It’s not my fault!” screamed the dinosaur. “Blame Curt!”

"Wait. Who's Curt?"

"The crippled kid."

"You attacked a crippled kid?"

"No, don't be stupid," he said. "I bit his arm off. Now he's crippled."

"And then you ate his father?"

Cliff threw his stubby dinosaur arms in the air. People say that size doesn't matter, but in this case it just looked stupid and anticlimactic in a way that an extra foot or two of biceps or forearms would've fixed. "Well of course I ate his father! What was I going to do? Say 'Sorry, I thought your son was a god-damned biscuit'?" he said. “Get your head in the game, Dan.”

Dan rested his head in his hands. It was a popular move for manic depressives and suicidals and he knew they'd sympathize with him. "So you ate Curt's friend." 

Cliff nodded. 

"And his father." 

Again, the reptilian nod of not-quite-contrition. 

"And your plan for containing your little problem?"

"Everyone suspects the father. Because he disappeared. How is there a problem? There is no problem!"

"The one-armed problem!"

"Oh. Right. Crippled Curt.”

That seems insensitive, thought Dan. "Yeah. That one."

"I don't think he'll say anything. He told me at the party that he'd always been a fan."

"Cliff...Cliff. You just ate his father. I don't think fandoms really matter as much at this stage of the game." 

For just the shortest moment, Dan thought he saw fear flash through the creature's eyes. But as fast as it'd appeared it was gone and the cunning gleam that had been there from the start (and was more than likely never anything more than hunger and insanity) was back. He winked a large reptilian eye and he did it slowly. Dan decided it was the creepiest fucking thing he’d ever seen in his life and that was saying a lot as he’d once seen Louis CK naked. It had not been consensual.

"I'll pay him a visit," said Cliff, in a conspiratorial 'I have a plan' voice.

"And say what?!" said Dan in a ‘No the fuck you don’t’ sort of tone.

Cliff gave him a pitying glance. "Dan. The last time he saw me, I was bludgeoning his father to death with his chubby toddler sausage arm. I don't really think I need to be especially selective when it comes to my threatening word choice."                                                                                 

***

"I should've been more selective with my word choice," Cliff said.

At this point, Dan's office was in shambles. His secretary had quit unexpectedly and vanished into the ether, his phone was ringing off the hook, and the darker side of celebrity gossip was beginning to run with Cliff's name as a person of interest. He’d only answered the phone twice and hung up immediately both times, once because it was his ex-wife who was still fucking David, a rival agent from the literary field, and another time because it was the feds. And if there was one thing he’d learned as a kid who hated when his parents told him not to throw rocks at old blind people, it was that he hated rules and laws. As such, he hated the feds.

Also? More dead kids. Because apparently that was becoming a thing now.

"What the fuck happened?"

"Apparently he was still traumatized."

"You murdered his two closest acquaintances about a day ago. And he's five. Of course he's fucking traumatized."

"Was."

“What?"

"'Was'. You know, past tense," Cliff sighed. “Look, Dan, I really don’t have time to give you grammar lessons.”

"'Crippled' isn't 'dead', Cliff."

"You people attach such emotional significance to these things!" he said. "Know what would be nice? Some acceptance of the whole 'survival of the fittest' doctrine, how about that? Whatever happened to Darwin? Loved that guy! Were people too weirded out by the fact that he wasn’t asking people to eat his body and drink his blood? God, you people are so weird."

Dan was screaming on the inside and it sounded like a little girl. It wasn't pretty, but that was less a ‘sexism’ thing and more a ‘middle-aged men shouldn’t sound like little children’ thing. "What. Happened,” he said.

"It was a simple mistake!" said the dinosaur. "He lost his head!"

"This isn't a time for wordplay!"

The dinosaur didn't have the decency to meet his agent’s eyes.

"His head was gone?" Dan asked in a whisper. 

"It wasn't purposeful.”

"Do heads mistakenly fall off?" he asked. “Because I did some college-level biology and I’m pretty sure they don’t.”

The dinosaur leaned away from the table, his claws carving ravines in the oak. For a brief moment, Dan thought about mentioning it but decided that such a thing wasn't really worth the risk, struggle, and inevitable disembowelment. Not that that's how things would've played out but such was the nature of the conversation. He thought of it as that initial creeped out feeling white people have when they go into a haunted house, where you figure something’s wrong but you’re just not sure. That shit will stick with you.

After all, thoughts of unwanted dissection tend to make any man cautious. 

"Look. I just went in to talk to the kid," he said. 

Dan looked skeptical. 

"Alright. I wanted to scare the shit out of him. Make sure he wouldn't say anything. You know, normal stuff."

Dan tactfully didn’t say that this wasn’t normal at all.

"How did you even get into the hospital?" he said.

Cliff looked at him as if he was an idiot. "I brought balloons."

"Oh."

"Anyways. I walk in, and he sees me. And he starts screaming. It was scary as all hell," he said. “Have you ever heard a child scream? Fucking yikes. It was bone-chilling.”

Dan tried to nod in an understanding fashion, but this was like listening to Hitler as he tried to justify a well-intentioned barbecue. 

"So there I am, claws out, doing my best snarl, and I do the only thing I can do. I rush the bed, figured I'd cover his mouth or something."

"So what the fuck went wrong?!"

"I tripped."

"You tripped."

"There were cords everywhere,” said the dinosaur. “They really should fix that.”

"You tripped. And you 'accidentally' chopped off his head."

Cliff spread his arms innocently. "Claws out, man! It's not like I was going to scare him if I effectively neutered myself,” he said. “I’ve gotta use the money-makers!”

"You're the fucking dinosaur who ate his dad! You were going to scare him regardless!"

For a moment Cliff looked sheepish, arms still spread out wide. "Well...yeah. But, claws out!"

Dan felt the wave of nausea rise again, like the tide or a wave that had consistently made rather terrible life choices instead of minding its own business in the ocean. One would think that such a time would've come about several years earlier, back when Cliff first stole a few kids off Neverland Ranch, but that wasn't the case. In many ways it probably would've been better to have it spread over time, because now? Now it was just a massive slab of horror that was slowly crushing him into the metaphorical ground. For the record, it didn’t feel good.

"Anyway," his client continued. "So there I am, standing there with this head, and for a couple minutes I tried to stick it back on. You know, plug him back in. You know, like Legos."

"You thought that would work?"

The dinosaur glared at him. "Of course I didn't think it would fucking work! But I figured it was at least worth a shot. Make a decoy crippled kid or something like that. Some assembly required or whatever,” he said. “Turns out it was harder than I thought."

"So you ran."

"So I totally ran."

"And you took the head?" 

"Well...yeah. I put it in my mouth for safe keeping."

"Why...?"

Cliff looked distraught. "Does it matter why? I was terrified! I was trying to hide evidence!" he screamed. 

"Well what happened to it?"

"I hit a speed-bump and accidentally swallowed it." 

Dan's eyes narrowed. "You don't even drive. You're a dinosaur."

Cliff suddenly looked evasive. "I tripped?"

"Dear god! You killed that kid on purpose, didn't you?" 

Cliff slammed dinosaur fists onto the table, his claws making audible clicking sounds of imminent terror and death. "Does it really fucking matter right now? We need to figure out what we're going to do!" he said. “Where are your crisis management skills?”

Dan was aghast. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"A plan! A career plan! You can spin this, right? We've gotten out of worse!”

There were three people dead within the last two days, the only thing all of them had in common was a giant purple dinosaur, and the media had this terribly disturbing fascination with dead children. "No...No I'm really quite sure that I've never even heard of anything like this before,” he said. “What the fuck, Cliff!"

It only occurred to him after he was done talking that, in reality, he probably should never have started. Whatever hysteria had cloaked the room in a dense fog of blood and arms was now gone, replaced by an eerie calm, a silence broken only by the tap-tap-tapping of claws on an oak wood table. Dan looked up slowly and met the eyes of his client and once again found them to be devoid of anything resembling compassion or even remotely human empathy.

Which made sense, really. Because he was a dinosaur. 

"Dan...maybe it's time we start talking about what's going to happen next," he said, reptilian eyes flickering to all parts of the conference room. "You need to get me out of this."

"You realize that I've done nothing like this before, right?" he asked. "At least if you were a person it'd be easy to blame it on someone who looks like you. You aren't and it's not. You're a fucking purple dinosaur, Cliff. How did you see this ending?"

Cliff was silent for a moment. Then he grinned. "Can we blame it on Barney?"

"Retired. Besides, it's a man in a suit."

"Shit."

"Yeah." 

Dan picked up the phone, dialed a number, it rang through to the answering machine and he hung up. 

"Who was that?" 

"Trying to reach my secretary. She might have an idea of what to do." 

Silence. 

"Ah. Which secretary?"

Dan’s eyes narrowed. "Donna. You know...the only secretary I've had for the last twenty years? She didn’t come in today.”

"Oh! Of course. Nice woman. Lovely woman," said Cliff. 

"Yeah, she bought me a sweater for my birthday."

"A sweater? In California? What a horrible woman. You must sweat a lot. I bet you wish she was dead sometimes," Cliff tapped his claws on the table. "Who else have you got? Just in case, I mean."

Dan felt his heart sink. "Oh god, what did you do?"

Cliff made a pacifying gesture. "Don't start with that again, I didn't eat her," Dan released a long breath. "She is dead, though."

“What?”

Cliff craned his head to look out into the empty lobby. "I'm going to assume you haven't had a cause for grabbing a coat, then?" 

"It's June. And we live in L.A. Why the fuck would I wear a coat?" he asked.

“Why would you wear a sweater?” asked Cliff. “Fucking Donna.”

“What did you do, you prehistoric lunatic?”

The dinosaur gave him a look filled with ridicule. "Where do you think I got the job offer, Dan?” he asked. “I've been out of work for months! Are you even paying attention? Donna got me a gig. All I had to do was show up at her friend's grandson's birthday party and say a few words."

"And so you killed her.”

"No! Grandson, yes. But that was inadvertent. And for whatever reason she seized on me as the one who killed him!" he said. "I'm pretty sure it was racism."

Dan made sure to choose his words carefully as he didn't want to end up dead, dying, or decapitated. "But you did kill him..."

Cliff let out an exasperated breath. "Well yeah. But there was no way she could've known that! That’s a bias of low expectations!” he said. “So anyway, she came at me like a crazed racist, screaming and yelling and this and that. So I bared my teeth and tried to scare some sense into her."

"And then what?"

"She screamed 'Shark punch!', and punched me in the nose."

"Did it hurt?"

"No. Want to know why?" 

Dan nodded. 

"Because I'm not a fucking shark!"

"Oh."

"And then just like that, she collapsed. Heart attack, I think. So I stuck her in the cleaning closet where she'll be safe until someone needs a vacuum. Victimless crime!"

"I'm pretty sure that's not how that works..."

“Really?"

"Damnit, Cliff. I liked Donna! She was practically family!"

The dinosaur tried multiple times to pull his face into a saddened frown, only giving up when he managed to poke himself in the eye. "Shit!" he said. "I'm in agony."

Dan couldn't help but wonder if his client knew what irony was. Then he wondered if he even knew what it was. It had always confused him. "Cliff..." he said, running his hands through his hair. "You've got to figure out a course of action, here. You've got to move on."

Cliff turned slowly. "Are you letting me go?"

Dan held his breath and silently wished he still carried a gun. Which he didn't. It was just so easy to get caught up in political fads in his line of work. "I don't know what to say, Cliff...I don't think there's anything left I can do for you.

Understanding dawned on the carnivorous monster. "Ah. It's because of Donna."

"What? No!" he said. "Well, maybe." He didn't bother mentioning how he was about to fire her for stealing post-its. At this point it just seemed like kicking a man when he was down, or, in this case, a dead woman when she was stuffed in a coat closet.

"No! I understand. Hold on, I'll get her!" Cliff said, his enthusiasm renewed.

"Wait, what?" said Dan. But before he could finish the thought, the dinosaur had sprinted from the office and down the hall. He took that moment to consider flinging himself out the fourth story window before deciding that he would rather face the piper (in the form of a reptilian client) than the concrete (in the form of, well, concrete). 

When Cliff came back, he was gasping for air. He wasn't nearly as healthy as he had been in the past, blaming children filled with Ritalin and candy for his declining health, and it showed anytime he had to run just about anywhere. Was this because ‘Ritalin’ was code for a thriving cocaine habit? No one really knew. 

"All I found was this!" 

He held up an arm. A Donna arm. 

Dan fell off his chair. "What the fuck is that!?" he screamed.

Cliff leaned across the desk, a wild glint in his eyes. The action caused the gory appendage to flop around lifelessly on the desk, tossing blood in a haphazard and soul-deadening way. 

"Dan. Someone stole Donna,” he said. “Don’t worry though. They left a clue.”

Dan cowered behind the table. It was his fortress now. 

"No...no, I think you ate her."

"What? I would never!" he said, clasping the arm to his chest in horror as he walked around to Dan's side of the table. 

This is a shitty fucking fortress, thought Dan.

"Cliff. You obviously killed Donna. Now would you please put her arm down?" he said, trying to move in a way that didn't say 'Holy shit, holy shit, I need to run.' Unfortunately, he was an agent and subtlety was one of his shortcomings, so when he tried to bolt he failed in spectacular fashion. 

He also couldn't help but wonder if this was a parable for his career in some way, but the most notable part about this failure had to be the finale. His escape ended suddenly and spectacularly when he was pelted in the back of the head by a piece of his former secretary. Which, while horrible, isn't something someone gets to say all that often.

From the hazy world of Dan's bicep-bludgeoned brain, he heard sirens in the distance and stumbled to his feet, driven by the hope that salvation might still be at hand. And while this was his exact thought process, he didn't see the pun as he grabbed the only thing nearby that could be used as a weapon: A mace in the form of an inevitably diabetes-ravaged arm that had just torpedoed the base of his skull.

"Stand back, Cliff," he said, swinging wildly, one arm now twice as long.

"Dan," said the slowly approaching Purple Death, his stubby arms at the ready. "Dan. I'm almost positive it wasn't me. Maybe it was Jose. He always seemed like an untrustworthy type."

"It wasn't the cleaning crew, you psychotic bastard!"

Maybe it was something about the inflection, maybe it was just the insult itself, but something in those words caused Cliff to snap and trigger the most bizarre fight scene in the history of humanity. He lunged, teeth clacking, jaws snapping, his famed "Claws out!" attack in full prominence, only to be met by a Donna Princeton

uppercut that stopped him in his tracks. He fell backwards, gasping in horror, his killer instinct momentarily thwarted.

Say what you would about the secretary's heartfelt demeanor, she had not been a small woman.

They continued like this for several minutes, claws raking open space, detached arm swinging, and it quickly became clear to Dan that no matter how rotund the arm, it was not going to hold together forever. This fact was reinforced when a rogue thumb bounced off his forehead after a particularly brutal exchange. He paused and skin flapped like exceptionally odd flags of potential surrender. 

"I'll tell them it was all your idea!" the raging Cliff screamed as the sirens came ever closer, swinging  his clawed yet stumpy arms and discovering that his reach was always about two feet too short. He’d never really learned how to cut off the ring, not even when he’d been auditioning for the Rocky reboot.

"They'll never believe I ate those children! I'm vegan by marriage!" said Dan, dancing two steps closer to the door and fending off attacks with repeated open-hand slaps to the face. 

“Your wife left you!” said the dinosaur. “But you’ll never fucking leave me!”

Dan parried, he thrusted (but not in a sexual way), and drove each point home with jabs to the nose and face. “I do what I want, you Cyrano de Bergerac ass bitch!” he screamed.

Cliff roared when a lacquered fingernail stabbed his eye, reeling and swinging at the air, and Dan did what any sane man would do. He screamed like a small child and bolted for the stairs, the wind of freedom beneath his metaphorical wings and very real third arm. 

It was heroic. It was impressive. And he felt a pride that would live on for the rest of his life.                              

***

Of course, he died roughly fifteen seconds later, so in the grand scheme of things that really wasn't saying much.

You see, his journey ended approximately one level down when he was shot somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-two times by horrified officers of the law who thought they were pursuing a child-devouring maniac in a Barney suit. As per the rights of any upstanding policemen, they were well within their rights to accidentally kill an innocent victim. Then again, it stood to reason that the approaching SWAT team had an issue with a rapidly approaching, manically screaming, bloodied man who carried with him what was clearly a tattered arm. 

The ranks had whimpered, sighted, and shot to hell the man who had just outfought a dinosaur with nothing more than a spare appendage. 

Had he been a deplorable human being? Sure, probably. But the level of ingenuity he'd displayed would never be known and that was rather sad in its own way. A tragedy that would’ve been seen as Shakespearian were it not for the actor who was still alive, one flight of stairs from those who’d shown they really didn’t discriminate with their gunfire. It made sense though. Police officering was a tough job so it made sense that sometimes you just had to light people up and hope. 

Upstairs, crouched behind Donna's desk, Cliff began to panic and in the moments immediately following the gunfire, his mind came up with spectacular (although wholly unrealistic) plans. He plotted a way to convince the masses that he was the victim, even if it meant slandering the dead. He would blame substance abuse because that always works. He'd talk to Oprah about being a repressed minority. He’d start a true crime podcast to help rehab his image.

And he'd absolutely never eat another child.

"Shit," he said. "This will never work!"

And so the planning went, over and over, round and round, right up until the SWAT team was just down the hall. 

"Is anyone down there?" A voice called.

"Yes! I'm a survivor!" said Cliff, trying to sound distressed as he finished chewing on some leftover Donna. “You’ll never believe what I’ve been through!”

He couldn't help it. He was a nervous eater. 

"Are you hurt or armed in any way?"

"I have giant claws, but it's alright, I'm the talent. My agent lost his mind and ate his secretary," Cliff held his breath over that last part. It seemed forced. 

How this seemed like a legitimate story in any way is a mystery, but the best and brightest lowered their weapons and made a swift approach, proving once and for all that the hero-worship of celebrity culture was a real problem in the States. When they saw who it was they were rescuing, Donna’s arm stuck between his teeth like a toothpick...well, it got to be a bit too late for fast-acting tactical maneuvers and Cliff was finally able to prove to himself that he could still win a fight despite having woefully short and stubby arms. 

He was also able to show that all the guns in the world couldn't do jack-shit in close quarters against a giant reptile, something the Jurassic Park films had never seemed to understand.

Bodies fell, blood splattered, and in the end, everyone died. 

Everyone except for Cliff, of course.

Because he was a fucking dinosaur.                                                                

                             ***  

Over the next several years, rumors surfaced in the entertainment world that breathed life into the legend of Cliff. They were whispered stories of auditions gone wrong, chubby toddlers gone missing, and Godzilla billboards having been defiled. All those and more. But no one was ever able to track him down, not even the authorities who gradually figured out that Dan hadn't grown an extra stomach that would've allowed him to devour several people over the course of two days. It took them awhile, but they got there.

In the meantime, Cliff became a phantom. A creature of the shadows. A purple knight. 

It was rumored to be all bliss and glory, right up until the very end when he died of a drug overdose in 2019 shortly after completing a government-sanctioned "Barney" rip-off in Mexico. Someone should‘ve seen it coming, really, as their economy was in shambles and they paid only in cocaine. But they didn’t and a has-been star died because of it. Candlelight vigils were held, women cried and men coped by drinking, and everyone conveniently forgot about the whole ‘so, he was totally evil, right?’ thing.

And so, as his giant body collapsed into a mound of white powder housed in a suspiciously empty orphanage, most were left to wonder what went wrong. 

What turned this titan of cinema into such a monster? What could they as a compassionate society have done differently? Was he always doomed to such a fate or was he a product of the celebrity system?

Somehow, just as Dan did when he first took Cliff on as a client, they all seemed to be overlooking a terribly obvious fact. A giant and obvious fact that ate children and rampantly snorted illicit drugs. There are always arguments that someone broke bad due to their nature, an evil inside of them, but with Cliff it was far easier to understand yet apparently just as easy to miss. It flew as a black flag in the night to the sound of the iconic Jurassic Park score. 

You see, Cliff was a dinosaur. 

A fucking dinosaur. 

And that was all the reason he needed.