“First thing you need,” you said, “is a knife.” You have one in hand already—as long as your finger, a curved edge tapering to a point. The hilt, scuffed with use, fits smoothly in your hand. “You need a good knife, good quality, as sharp as you can manage. Dull knives get you killed.”
The dead dinosaur is strewn over the table in a heap of bones, meat, and iridescent scales. Black blood pools in the creases of the plastic tarp wrapped over the top. The tail hangs off the side, the tip dragging on the ground; the head is tucked into the neck to keep it from doing the same.
“The skin goes first.” You dig the knife into the base of the neck, where the spine meets the skull, then down, down, down the rest of the spine, to the end of that long tail. Scales resist, bend, give way to the cut; the meat beneath is a pale, fleshy pink webbed with gibbous fat. “Oh, would you look at that! You can make some fine steaks off this beauty.” New incisions, around the wrists and ankles, with slits down the underside of the limbs.
Scales gleam like beads under the fluorescent lights, red-blue-green-violet-gold sequins, arranged in nebular patterns. You saw at the underside, where the soft dermis clings stubbornly to the muscle. All it takes is a few flicks of the wrist—see-saw, see-saw—pull away, carefully, like dried wax off bare skin—tissue unfastens thread by thread, snip-snip-snip. You strip it newborn-naked from neck down. When you are down, the dinosaur does not look like a dinosaur as much as it looks like a carved block of strawberry ice-cream. Mm, ice-cream. Your mouth is watering, but you resist the urge. Dinner is coming soon enough.
You say, “The organs are next. Now, I’m all for waste-not-want-not as much as anyone, but is it really wasting if it’s useless? That’s all I’m saying.” As you speak, you are already slicing the belly open. One hand grabs the upper flap of flesh, holding it open. The other hand goes straight in, shoveling fistfuls of viscera, which are not nearly as pastel or proportional as the biology textbooks diagrams say. Mostly they are maroon. You wipe your hand off on the table and take up your knife again, arm disappearing up to the elbow in the gaping abdominal cavity. When your arm reappears, it is with a stomach the size of a deflated basketball, as maroon as the rest. You drop it into a basket by your feet and go back in. Kidneys. Pancreas. Gallbladder. “Most of these,” you say, removing a transverse colon with a deft flair of the knife, “aren’t quite safe to eat. These little suckers are packed with shit.”
You smile down at your gutted dinosaur, absentmindedly scratching your chin. It leaves a brown stripe bridging your lower lip and cleft. “I’m thinking . . . a barbecue. My mom has this spice rub recipe that could make dirt taste good. She gave it to me—uh, sort of. She said she’d give it to me, but she went ahead and killed herself before she ever did. I found the recipe on my own when going through her wallet. Two tablespoons of brown sugar, twice as much of smoked paprika and half for black pepper—oh, not that you all get the rest of it.” You tap a finger against your smiling mouth. “That’s a family secret.”
The next cut you make is into the hind. You carve away a long ribbon of meat, thick and firm and white, to hold it up to the camera as though it’s a trophy. “See? This! This is what we’re looking for! I mean, it’s science, isn’t it? Plants get energy from the sun, animals get energy from plants, humans get energy from animals. The ten percent rule.” You gently set the steak aside and start on a new cut, trimming away the yellow layers of fat. “Like, how else are we supposed to eat? There’s all this roast-to-be running all over the place now. Go out and seize the day! Or your knife, I guess.” You waggle said knife, silver-pink-glisten like a dead fish.
It takes an hour or so to work through the carcass. Slowly, patiently, you have rearranged a full-sized reptile into two things—a neat pile of marbled steaks and a succulent skeleton dripping leftover fat. Food and waste. “Though not really waste,” you correct yourself. “Bones today are soup tomorrow. Waste-not-want-not.”
The last thing left is the head. The neck is gone now, reshaped into a coiled spine and cuts of barbecue, so there’s nothing left to hide the face. You grab it by the scruff, turning it up to you. You study the eyes. Blue eyes. Flat, sloping face. A gullet so soft and white you can swear it’s cream.
“We have to eat something,” you tell the dinosaur, in the patient exasperation of an older sister. “At least there’s more meat on you this way. And you’re not even you anymore!” You press a kiss—maroon as your knife, maroon as your hands—on the hole between those mazarine eyes. A little maroon rosebud framed in cornflowers. “Waste-not-want-not. Like our mom always said. Don’t worry,” you say, “you’re going to be delicious.”
