Many years ago, my mother took me to a museum to see dinosaurs for the first time. It was a last-minute thing. She called it a mother and son day. We’d never had one before. I was nine years old. That morning her blue eyes were puffy and red. Her face pale, drawn, preoccupied.

I was glad to get out of our house, away from my father. He was a snoring heap on the living room sofa when we left. Still wearing the same faded black t-shirt and grungy jeans as the day before. Cradling an empty Skol bottle in his tattooed forearms. He’d had one of those kinds of nights again. Only worse.

My mother and I stood before the colossal bones of Tyrannosaurus rex. Me: wide-eyed, staring in silent wonder at every terrifying inch of him. Her: narrow-eyed, focused on her phone, a blur of fingers tapping text messages.

I had always been fascinated with dinosaurs, with the idea there were once monsters in the world. “Mom, look,” I said, excitedly tugging her arm. “He could eat me in one gulp.”

She looked up from her phone, glanced at the big toothy skull. “Good thing for you he got wiped out by an asteroid.”

Her phone pinged. She went back to texting. I kept looking at the Tyrannosaurus, imagining him stomping and roaring through primitive swamps chasing after me, like in the movies.

For a while, I didn’t think about my father. The string of lost jobs. Lost friends. All the wall punching, table pounding, plate smashing fits of rage. His mean vodka voice. My mother and I always having to tread carefully around the house, trying not to trigger him. I was happily lost in the dinosaur age.

I dragged my mother through the museum, wanting to look at every prehistoric skeleton, every fossilized fragment displayed under glass. There were cracked sauropod eggs. Velociraptor talons. Allosaurusteeth. Remnants from a long ago, demolished world.

While I was daydreaming about the past, my mother was on the phone with her sister talking about the present, asking her if we could visit for a while. She turned away from me and whispered into the phone, “It was really bad last night. I’m scared.”

I thought about what happened. My father drunk again, waving a sharp pair of scissors at my mother and I, the menace in his eyes. Her sending me to my room, making me lock the door. Her calm voice talking to him. Him pleading for forgiveness, to never leave him, before opening another bottle. Me realizing there werestill monsters in the world.

“You’re a life saver. See you soon.” My mother put away her phone.

She reached for my hand, held onto it—a warm, firm, protective grip. It was just the two of us standing there, surrounded by the bones of dinosaurs, their catastrophic ending forever looming over them. I pictured an asteroid hurtling through outer space toward us. Everything was about to change.

– Scott Bolendz

Author’s Note: The idea for “Dinosaur Age” came from a story my mother told me about her childhood. She grew up in Queens, New York in the 1940s in a household with an unstable, sometimes, violent family member. Her mother would often take her to the American Museum of Natural History so they could enjoy some quiet time together away from their home. The museum was a sanctuary for them. My mother loved the dinosaur exhibits. She used to tell her mother that she wanted to be an archeologist when she grew up—until she learned that they dug in the ground and got dirty.