As Soon as the Timer Goes Off

“Dad?”

“Yeah, babe?”

“Do you think dinosaurs actually had a civilization, but everything they built got destroyed when the asteroid hit?” Her eyes had that light in them and the corners of her mouth twitched slightly as if she were suppressing a smile, so I knew she wasn’t looking for a serious answer.

“Well, after the asteroid, they couldn’t pay their bills any more, so everything probably got repossessed.” That cracked her smile, and my heart, wide open.

“The mammals must have prepossessed it all, so the dinosaurs became birds so nobody could prepossess their stuff any more,” she slipped out between giggles.

“That makes sense,” I said.She shot me back her “silly daddy” look of feigned frustration with arms akimbo then we both collapsed in fits of laughter. I hadn’t felt this warm and complete since I didn’t know when. Why, then, was there an aching hollow behind it? Because I knew that she was growing up and I knew that these moments would be more and more fleeting? No, it was something else that was just beyond the tip of my consciousness.

“Do you want to make some cookies?” I asked. “We could use those dinosaur cookie cutters your mom got. Oatmeal or chocolate chip?”

“Chocolate chip!”

I let her crack the eggs since it made her feel like a big girl, and I fished the pieces of shell out while she got the chocolate chips out of the fridge. We started laughing again when we realized that cookie cutters don’t really work with chocolate chip cookie dough, but we still managed to lay down a dozen deformed and mutant dinosaurs down on the parchment paper of the baking tray. And then the timer went off.

“Mr. Nelson?” The kitchen, the cookies, and Janie all disappeared like shadows obliterated by the sun. Professor Heinemann analyzed my face. “Have you left the memory behind?”

“The memory? Where’s Janie?”

“I know it’s jarring to come out of an archived reality. It might take a couple of hours for the drug to become completely metabolized and anchor you back to the present. Your daughter, Jane, died of leukemia twenty-three years ago. The synaptic enhancer we gave you allowed you to relive a specific memory you had of her. Some of our clients describe it as being like time travel.”

“Yeah,” I said, blinking back tears. “I went back to the time of the dinosaurs.” Dr. Heinemann didn’t reply, but he took down some notes on my chart.