Sick Boy[s] Paddle Club↓

The Dancing Plesiosaur

Jingran 景然

Translated by: 1+

My parents and I went to the museum to see the plesiosaur. The weather was perfect; the sun was glaring off the white tiles, and we drilled into the thick, cool air of the museum.

The Museum, located in a small town, owned almost nothing of value. The only attractive thing was an enormous, nearly two-story-tall plesiosaur model. The plesiosaur could turn its head, swish its tail, and roar, feeling extraordinarily vivid.

I liked dinosaurs, and the Cretaceous—a period when life was bursting, and the ants were as large as humans. I felt a sense of reverence for knowing that those mythological stories had once actually existed on the ground beneath my feet, as if I were worshipping a god.

We stayed there until the evening drew in. I pushed open the museum gate and couldn’t resist turning back, only to find the plesiosaur had also turned its head in my direction, as if it were watching me as I left. There seemed to be sadness in its eyes, begging me not to leave. And I think maybe it was just me being delusional.

When I returned home, I began to dream of it, the plesiosaur. In my dream, it was resting in a pool with a huge amusement park behind it. It stretched its neck to knock on my window, but failed because its neck was not long enough. I was scared. I only dared to glance out through a crack in the window, and all I could see was a dark blur and a pair of sparkling eyes.

I told my parents about the dream. They laughed and said the heat was getting into my head. That’s also possible considering the summer was abnormally hot this year. The scorching sunshine had melted the asphalt roads into swamps, and many people had been stuck in them, according to the news. The heat twisted reality. People claimed to have seen mirages. The swollen, fat clouds floated so close to the ground that it was almost touchable, but whenever people stretched out their hands, they drifted beyond reach again.

Commerce in the small town mushroomed, growing with the same great momentum as the climbing temperature. Now and then, someone would jump onto a truck and disappear, then return several years later in a sports car with its engine roaring; or we just never heard from them again. Buildings clad in green glass and celluloid tiles were rising. The only commercial street was so busy that the pedestrians were shoulder-to-shoulder, always covered in sweat. Clowns performed along the streets; Santas gave out tin frogs. Kids cried and watched out of desperation as the balloons disappeared into the sky because they couldn't hold them tight. A camel with ringing bells was led through the street after a long journey; people lined up to get pictures with it. Even the spooky Christian church in the West Mountain Park came alive—rumors of vampires spread recently and attracted nosy tourists. Yet, only for them to find inside a priest—who was pale and seriously ill.

At that time, I fell in love with two things: the smell of flying dust—it gave me inner peace; and the old camera at home—it had completely fallen behind and produced only distorted photos. But that was exactly why I liked it, for how reality looked entirely different through it. With its memory card missing, it could not store any photos. I used to wander around on sunny afternoons with the camera, taking pictures, but I could not show them to anyone as proof; the scenes replayed over and over in my head were all I had left. In the end, the memory of myself taking photos with the camera turned out to be the clearest one.

I preferred nights to days. My parents used to work late and leave me all alone in the empty house. I would turn off all the lights, wrap the sheet around my body, and let the television play midnight cartoons. I  always felt there was a plesiosaur outside the window, resting in the pool, looking at me sadly. This feeling somehow comforted me.

One night after our visit to the plesiosaur, my parents drove me to fly kites in front of an under-construction-commercial-building. I rolled down the window and reached out to feel the wind. The scenery rushing past seemed so unreal in the wind. I closed my eyes, feeling my hair sway like seaweed.

We arrived at the plaza accompanied by dim lights. A group of children roared past us in inflatable cars, while others were bouncing in the bouncy castle or playing with bamboo-copters. Some women were advertising aerobics by distributing flyers around the plaza. Perhaps it was the dim lights, but everything was so nostalgic. Behind the children, the unfinished building stood without a single light on, like an enormous black brick buried in the dim glow and shades of night.

The night was rather windy, and the kite-flying went well. I ran on the soft grass, looking up at the night sky. Suddenly, I saw a street lamp so high that it seemed almost to poke through the sky, glowing white; it resembled the damp snake eye. The dark purple sky was spinning like The Starry Night. A few stars blinked dimly, as if they were about to disappear. The only things left were the boundless darkness, the cold light, and a sudden teetering kite.

What just happened made me uneasy. Those women walked over and handed my parents a flyer, saying the discount was unprecedented. They all looked the same, all dressed in black. The wrinkles around their eyes twitched with seemingly bad intentions. I grabbed my parents’ hands, begging them not to go, desperately. My mother was cautious about it, yet my father seemed interested. He broke away and followed them. I watched him walk into a dark building, go on the elevator, waving and smiling to us through the glass, and I knew he would never come back. I turned and looked at my mother. She seemed not to care at all. A teasing smile hung on the corner of her mouth. This woman in front of me didn’t look like my mother.

All of this made me uneasy. I broke free from my mother’s grip and ran towards the street. All of a sudden, I needed that plesiosaur. Something in my mind told me that it was somehow related to all of this.

I ran and ran, gasping for breath. The buildings on both sides looked at me like silent monsters. Only the shadow of the tower crane remained, staring at me like the head of the plesiosaur. The river was as still as a black mirror—its flow could no longer be heard. I ran at full speed down the main street, where there were no cars. The whole town was dead. My heart, swallowed up by loneliness, began to palpitate.

The gate of the museum was wide open, and inside was ablaze with lights. With no one around, the museum was silently welcoming me. I ran past the hanging dinosaur fossils, the counterfeit Egyptian sarcophagus, and then a row of suspended bronze swords, all the way to the end of the corridor.

The plesiosaur was not there.

It was looking at me sadly from outside the gate when I slowly turned around. Dark purple mountains rose behind it layer upon layer, along with a dim street lamp. It looked at me sadly and let out a mournful cry. Then began to dance. The ground shook with every move, and the whole museum swung from side to side. A bang echoed through the hall, making it seem even emptier. I stumbled and grabbed the camera as it slipped out of my pocket. I was filming; I was the only recorder of the plesiosaur. It looked into my lens, then roared furiously and rushed towards me. I fell to the ground and lost consciousness.

I found myself waking up in my bed at home with no one around. Outside the window, the sun was shining and a thin layer of clouds drifted in the sky; the convenience stores had run out of ice cream, and we were running out of summer. I searched for my camera and found only one picture stored in it—me and my family in front of the plesiosaur.

Everything disappeared. The town, my childhood. My urge to cry when the summer went by was the only thing left. The only thing that’s real.

Jingran

A student of law and also a writer for the school magazine. His favorite director is David Fincher. He's also orderly and obsessive-compulsive. The millennial generation is a natural idealist.