Mosasaur Doing A Mosaic About And The Street Of The City Was Pure Gold, Like Transparent Glass

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The mosasaur came to town the way lost thoughts come to the back of your head: slow at first, then suddenly there, dripping old ocean and a smell like prehistoric afternoon naps. Nobody panicked. Panic takes planning, and this city was too busy polishing its golden streets, buffing the transparency until you could see straight through your own reflection and out the other side of your life.

He set up shop on the corner by the laundromat that never finished drying anyone’s clothes, and the bakery that sang hymns only bread could understand. The mosasaur didn’t roar or chew cars like popcorn. He collected broken things. Tiles from bathrooms that once held arguments in their damp corners. Plates that had seen marriages crack cleanly in two. Shards of beer bottles that had listened, silently, to men explaining their small sadnesses to no one. He laid them out like puzzle pieces that never knew they were meant for the same picture.

People stopped. At first, they pretended not to. You know the way we do with miracles, squinting like they’re the sun or a neighbor’s new lawn ornament we disapprove of but can’t look away from. The mosasaur worked with a tenderness so large it didn’t need to be gentle. His giant prehistoric flippers tapped and placed, tapped and placed, with the patience of a dinosaur who had waited 70 million years to finally have something quiet and beautiful to do.

He didn’t speak, but the sound of the mosaic forming was a language: a soft click song, a hymn made of fragments. And slowly, the city realized what he was making. It was us. It was them. It was all the Tuesdays that no one remembered and the one Wednesday someone cried in the grocery aisle and pretended it was because of onions. It was lovers who stayed and lovers who left and the strange glitter sadness leaves behind. It was childhood bicycles and unpaid bills and faint hopes that look stronger in certain light.

Under his work, the golden street shone like someone had bottled sunlight and cooled it into honesty. You could see straight through it, through the gold, through your shoes, through your feet, down to whatever small truth lives beneath everything we say to each other.

When he finished, no one clapped. You don’t clap for rain. You don’t clap for the moon. You just stand there and let it rearrange the furniture in your chest.

Then the mosasaur nodded, as if to say, See, you were never really broken. You were just waiting to be arranged differently. He slid away down the transparent gold street, disappearing into the shimmer like a misplaced dream that politely excused itself from your mind.

The mosaic stayed. The city stayed. And everybody walked a little more carefully, as if something ancient and kind were watching their footsteps, and maybe, for once, cheering them on.