She peered in through the window. Shadowy forms oscillated in dusted shafts of light. She knew that from the large domed ceiling a skylight was showering the occupants in electrons. This, the abandoned ball room that her parents wouldn’t let her enter. Where they kept the stuffed toys. All of her childhood friends in fact, the grizzled teddies, the anorexic dolls, the action figures, the lego children. On through the ages of her childhood they had advanced, first loved, then discarded. Now at midnight they were having a ball.
She creaked the door ever so slightly, just to get a glimpse of their rhythmic gyrations. Was that a thud? Could that be Mum or Dad’s slippered foot descending in the dark, no all was a hush. She was safe. She pressed an eye up against the slit of the barely open door. She could see Teddy Jonathan’s crinkled-up furry bottom pumping delicately.
Oh, what fantastic music must they be dancing to? She couldn’t hear any. Her Mum and Dad had told her it was a secret dance and she must never go in there. But they were asleep now and couldn’t stop her. Pushing the door a little further…Teddy Jonathan was somehow entwined with Miami Melanie, a female form clad in a flimsy bikini. She’d had good times, serving her mud pies under the sycamore tree on her parents’ luscious lawn.
With a thrust of curiosity she found herself in the room and they turned to look at her. Bodies still but heads turning in mechanical precision.
Teddy Jonathan’s amber eye glinted as he looked straight at her, tongue lolling. “We wondered, when you’d visit”, he growled.
“Come in, come in”, Miami Melanie purred in plastic persuasion.
“But..what..what..are you all doing?”, she half- breath whispered.
“You’re 18 now girl, it’s time you found out what toys are for!”, announced an unseen voice.
She looked up, to spy the black pipe-cleaner spider with the 4ft span as it descended from the ceiling, a curious rubber appendage getting ever closer to her upturned face…
The Dinosaur Selection Process 