1863 was the year of low tide, before everything heated up. Before oceans warmed enough to cleanse them of the cruel sea beasts who once ruled it—beasts of unimaginable proportions; and the waters mercifully rose to meet our needs.
The terrible monsters took jellyfish to the brink of extinction, ate our children who came too near the shore. Their lungs sucked the salt from the water, and somehow they could breathe in depths yet unexplored by our nuclear submarines, dark & unimaginable at the time. They exhaled ice that sought poles, and beyond, expanded hideous glaciers, caps, threatened to overtake the entire earth and freeze all its water. Meaning, our beaches grew larger until the ocean could not contain them all & vomited them up onto coarse sand. Bloated villainous dinosaurs, proto-human beasts too ugly to label sirens.
That year, they washed ashore. 1863 was the end of an ice age nobody talks about or remembers, repressed for all its cruelty. The air was foul with their stench. The birds pecked at them and coughed. The poorest urchins burned their fat in lanterns, filling their sad burnt children with putrid stench until they could not bear it; until they no longer needed the heat, and the climate finally changes. We could now go out in real summer clothes made in factories far away, carries by coal-burning ships that could not travel thousands of miles without feat of a monster ramming the bow and rupturing the steel stern.
My brother & I found the last documented massosaur. It was a Wednesday or Thursday. Good riddance. It was a stinking beast with a carbuncled tongue, lolling in the sand. I jabbed a stick i'd imagined to be a spear straight through its jaundiced yellow eye into its brain, clear like gelatin. My brother could only point, retching, until he gained the courage to rip every one of its teeth from its ugly head and sold them.
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