Jeff Goldblum was maddening. Mitzy lay in bed, naked to the ceiling fan’s rotations, sweat beading on her cleavage, her stomach, everything. Jeff would not take his eyes off her, that stare so moody, so dark, just like Jurassic Park.

“What are you going to do to me, Goldblum.” She parted her dry lips.

The dark philosopher would not reply, just hummed under his breath. Why anybody paid to watch him front the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, she couldn’t imagine. No musical talent. Just an atonal whine. No, his talents lay elsewhere and were of the pectoral variety.

How she had ended up here, trapped in her bed, held hostage by this handsome fiend she didn’t know, except she never should’ve had drinks with that man last week, the one whose Tinder profile said he was an electrician. He’d leaned in close at dinner, his breath on her neck. And with the martini assaulting her liver and the loneliness of a 50 year-old City Hall cashier assaulting everything else, she’d giggled. Ted. That was his name, she remembered now. Ted the electrician with the mustache like a toilet brush, dentures like yellow corn stuck in putty. He kissed her badly, breathy and nervous, said his wife was dead five months ago, at least technically, no brain function left, down at St. Philippa’s Long-term Care, an aneurysm while vacuuming, and he didn’t know what this Tinder thing was all about but his son made a profile for him, and he had a good pension coming in. That’s when Mitzy had excused herself to the bathroom of Benny’s Steak and Chops, and left by the back door to the pool hall.

“Not all Earth girls are easy. You’re jealous, Jeff, jealous,” Mitzy accused.

Goldblum in his green-shaded glasses, eyes boring into her with their machismo, their hunger. “Yes. Yes, I am, Mitzy. You’re a feast for my eyes. So dewy, so moist, teaming with, uh, life.”

Her cat, T-Rex, merely sat on the bureau, green eyes glowing. Approval.

“You’re on his side?” Mitzy exclaimed.

“Mitzy,” Jeff Goldblum’s reedy voice vibrated in her eardrums, “Mitzymitzymitzy,” it melted together into a droning incantation. For a moment, he caressed her cheek, then retreated. Black jeans. Bare chest like thrashing stallions, tanned and damp. “You shouldn’t have betrayed me, Mitzy. It’s, uh, not advisable.”

The heat was unbearable now, her forehead boiling like a lobster in a pot.

“Damn you, Goldblum,” she hissed. “Finish this!” She found the will to lift her arm and swing at him, tissues and an empty glass clattering to the floor, but he disappeared, then reappeared, hunched at the foot of the bed, grinning. If only her phone hadn’t run out of batteries two days ago, like a lifeless stone monolith from 2001, except she was the monkey beating her chest.

“What is it you want?”

“To impregnate you, Mitzy, what else?”

Mitzy, whose last egg had suicided into a City Hall toilet six months ago, solidifying her eternal spinsterhood and complete disuse to the human genome, called his bluff. “Go ahead, Goldblum, try.”

His laughter was a theater full of irate fans hissing. T-Rex must not have liked it either. He leaped forward and pounced. Jeff Goldblum, for all his bravado, his tight jeans and mullet, squished rather easily. She blinked. Was he a fly or a man? It seemed there were wings coming from under T-Rex’s paw.

“Help me, Mitzy.” He gasped from the foot of the bed, eyes bulging, impaled by T-Rex’s claws. “Help me be hu—“

T-Rex silenced the philosophical musings forever by sitting on him.  

Mitzy’s head fell back against the sweat-stained pillow. She couldn’t move, couldn’t get words out, her eyes straining for anything that could save her. There was nothing in reach except an open can of Fancy Feast, a dead phone, and a little white tester strip with one orange line with a “C” next to it, one purple line with a “T.” Not pregnant, isn’t that what it meant? She couldn’t be sure, forehead melting into her brain cavity. But whatever it was, it was Ted’s fault. Ted the breather.

“Why do it, T-Rex?” she moaned. “Jeff Goldblum was all I had left.”

– Silver Webb