Extinction

Not too long before I veered into a ditch and sliced open my front right tire like a baked potato, I finally snapped at Stego. My therapist tells me that sibling rivalries are completely normal, especially for a “high-pressure environment” (read: divorced parents) like mine. Well, I was certainly about to burst with my stepbrother’s inane ramblings as he puppeted around plastic dinosaurs, explaining that their colors are all wrong and they’d have feathers here and this one wasn’t technically a dinosaur and all kinds of crap. You’ll tell me that I shouldn’t be surprised that a kid named Stego would go ape about 26-million-year-old pedantics, but he was introduced to me on a bed of false assumptions.

My parents split legally when I wasn’t too much older than Stego, nearly eight years ago now, but it took until last year for my dad to finally say sayonara and whiz on down to Tucson, home to a cushy professor position and a new shotgun-wedding wife. Turned out the next time I drove down to see him that it was a buy-one-get-one package deal, with a cute blond-haired googly-eyed kid named Stevie. Well, I figured that wasn’t all too bad for a while, but once Dad and Mom 2.0 (I don’t deign to learn or repeat her name) started leaving us alone, I figured out why Mom 2.0 was single and ready to mingle with my dad: Stevie must’ve driven her old husband bonkers.

When we first really met, Stevie wanted to play a game with me called Dinosaur, which is where you pretend to be a dinosaur in the backyard and make a ruckus. This is where he revealed his dinosaur persona/nickname, Stego as in Stegosaurus, and asked me what mine would be as he picked his nose and wiped it in the red soil. My first choice was, of course, the T-Rex, but he told me his friends at school already covered that one as well as the Triceratops, Ankylosaurus, and Pterodactyl. 

“Well,” I asked, “you seem to be the dinosaur expert. What should my codename be?”

He thought for a moment and made a mess drawing a spiral in the dirt before answering.

“You can have the, uh, Pachycephalosaurus. It’s the one with a big forehead like a hard hat.”

I was offended as all hell, but could give no objection— he’d already long expended my dinosaur knowledge— and so I played Dinosaur and hit things with my hard head and was dubbed Packy, which is a sucky codename.

Now that I could drive myself, my parents decided that split between Phoenix and Tucson they would just start a damned Foreign Exchange program with the two boys in the middle. So, we came to an agreement where I would leave Mom every quarter year or so, drive down to Tucson to see Dad and Stego and Mom 2.0, drive Stego up to meet Mom the Original, drive back down to drop the little rascal off, and drive back up a fourth time all by my lonesome to go collapse in bed and vow never to see family again.

Well, it was during one of those third legs driving Stego down to Tucson that all this came to happen, both of us filled up on Mom’s sweet potato casserole as I slogged through the two-hour drive down I-10, now getting pretty late into the night.

So anyway, I caught my hand slipping on the wheel after Stego tossed a pterodactyl at my arm, and that was when I yelled louder than I should have. I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll just say I think Stego learned a few more words, and he was flat-out bawling, while dropping his toys and snacks on the roughed-up car mat to form a new La Brea Tar Pit.

“Hey Stego, it’s alright, dude. Just, I know it’s past your bedtime and all, so maybe you can take a nap, and I’ll just turn on the radio. Or get out your book from your backpack or whatever, just don’t throw your damn dinosaurs at me.” 

“Not a dinosaur,” he sniffled. “‘Cause the Pterosaurs can fly.”

I was half-ready to throw him out the window and see how far he could fly when my tire started scraping. I was in Mom’s silver Wrangler, which is supposedly for off-roading, but, apparently, I’d gradually inched off the road, and it wasn’t liking it too much. At this point, we were half-on, half-off, and Stego was tilted down to the right with the dinosaurs making a scratchy racket on the floor. In a panic, I tried just cranking my wheel to the left, but a branch that had gotten in the left lane spooked me, and before I knew it I was veering off I-10 and braking like my life depended on it.

Big scary moments like that have a tendency to either drag on forever or go by in an instant, and my crash was the latter. I was off the road in the middle of the desert, with a bunch of spiky bushes on Stego’s side as he started up another crying fit.

“Stay here, buddy, everything’s alright,” I said knowing it was not. At the very least, I wanted to prevent having to explain to Dad why Stego and his toys got shoved into a prickly bush, so I opened my car as it beeped and whistled all sorts of “Did you crash into a ditch?” sounds.

The first thing that struck me was just how dark it all got. Stego had the light on inside, which provided a little illumination, but down the stretch of road, it was empty and very, very dark. What’s more, we had gone almost the whole way with empty roads, and it seemed to be the same now. If there was one other car on the whole interstate, I probably would’ve crashed into it, but, indeed, there was not.

I pulled up my big kid pants and walked around the front perimeter of my car. Honestly, I don’t know if Stego was being protected by the dinosaur gods or what, but we got off on a miracle. If I hadn’t braked so fast, we would’ve careened right through an electric fence, and the only negative seemed to be that my tires were all scraped up on the right side, particularly the front one. I think I’ve mentioned already that it was sliced right through like a baked potato, but even the back one was definitely flat, so Jeep’s trademark spare tire wasn’t going to do us much good.

I sat on the sand feeling pathetic and looked up at the pristine sky and thought about how this wouldn’t have ever happened if my parents had stuck together or they hadn’t chosen Stego and me to be their ambassadors. I drove Stego two ways, and it was never happy camping: either we were going to see Mom, and he was throwing a hissy fit, or I was trudging back to Dad’s new house just to drop him off and go drive some more. I figured that after this, Mom might be more receptive to letting us live our separate lives and taking me off babysitting duty.

Well, speaking of, Stego was knocking his T-rex on the window, so I opened the car back up and sat down, putting my head in my hands. I was a little surprised that he patted me on the shoulder with his hand instead of an Ankylosaurus spine or something.

“Are we gonna go home yet?”

I glanced up, and he was crying again, his hair tangled into a prehistoric style. I couldn’t help but wring my fingers through it, trying to comb it back into the modern day.

“Sorry, Stego, the car is busted up pretty bad.”

I checked my phone, just in case, but it confirmed what I already knew about this middle-of-nowhere stretch of highway: no bars, no hope. I tried to do some mental math about which exit would be closest on foot.

“Hey, Dominic?” The name sounded a little stilted on his tongue— I think it was the first time he’d ever called me something other than Pachy.

“Yeah, Stego? Stevie?”

“Well…” He had his feet up on the seat treading all sorts of dirt in my mom’s car. “I’m sorry I hit you with Mr. Pterodactyl and made you crash.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. The car’s lights turned off automatically, and we were bathed in stars. When I talked to my mom after that first game of Dinosaur with Stego, I’d complained about him, and she just told me that everyone’s been eight once, so have some compassion. I guess I was feeling that way, like age didn’t matter because I was seeing the same stars as an eight-year-old, the same stars that the dinosaurs had.

“I forgive you, man. We just might have, uh, a long night. You see, the road isn’t very busy this time of night, so we’d be hard pressed to find anybody—”

“Like that one?”

Stego’s face sharpened in the light as he pointed out the back window, and soon I realized that the sliver of light on his face was getting brighter. Both of us clambered out of the car on my side, and, sure enough, I could see that pinpoint of light developing into a truck in the distance. We’d hardly been stranded for ten minutes, but still we waved and yelled like cavemen as I fumbled with my phone flashlight.

As if Stego spoke a little miracle into the world, a sixteen-wheeler pulled up to us as he marveled at the big wheels. The passenger door opened, and a portly guy with a bushy grey beard and overalls waved out at us.

“Hi, we crashed off the road!” Stego blurted before I got the chance to interject, and the driver gave a Santa Claus laugh.

“Yeah, good evening mister.” I tipped my imaginary hat to him and gestured to our pathetic-looking “off-roader.” “I’ve got two flat tires. Is there anything you could help with? It would mean a lot to me… and my brother.”

The driver scratched his beard in thought, his lit-up truck a beacon on the empty interstate. 

“Well, I’ll call AAA, but they might be a while. Where are you boys heading?”

I said, “Tucson” and Stego said, “Home.” The driver nodded solemnly and ushered us inside, and Stego beamed as he packed up his little backpack full of dinosaurs.

Finally, we went on our way, cruising down the empty road under a picture-perfect atlas of constellations. Stego explained the intricacies of how his beloved dinosaurs became the truck’s fuel for a while, but his words started blurring together, and soon he was getting some much-needed rest. The driver smiled at me after he called AAA and asked whether I needed to call anyone before we got into town.

“Yeah, I need to talk to both my parents – one at a time. I’ll start with my mom. I want to ask her if I can spend a few more days with Stego.”

I watched his unruly hair bob in the backseat. He was totally zonked out. For a long while, I forgot where I was and just looked out the window, searching for long-dead dinosaurs scratching spirals in the soil.

Graeme Melcher ‘26

As a kid, I had (not uncommon) obsessions with dinosaurs and outer space. I wanted to explore the process of becoming a jaded teenager and returning to that childhood wonder in this piece. The desert highways of the American Southwest are quite a landmark for anyone who loves dinosaurs or outer space, so I thought that a small brotherly conflict there could lead to some real change and reflection.