Black Static #78#79 Double Issue (Spring 2021) by TTA Press

Author:TTA Press [TTA Press]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
Publisher: TTA Press
Published: 2021-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

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Saber-Toothed Tigers. Easily the most popular of the animals found in the tar. (Such things can be successfully measured by how much money the animal represents in gift shop purchases. Steve sometimes feels that he is the grand marshal of a parade of saber-toothed kitsch. Coffee cups. Posters. Socks.

Steve once, somehow, sat in on a meeting of the tar pits marketing team. How he did this is unclear even to him; maybe it was when he started at the gift shop, years ago. He was still thinking about getting married, becoming an electrician. If you asked him back then, he’d have told you he had a lot to offer the world. Anyway – in this meeting someone had let it drop that the money brought in by the saber-toothed cats alone had funded research and excavation at the pits for decades. Good thing we found the cool animal first, one of the marketers said. They were all interns, students studying marketing at UCLA. And Steve had to silently agree – imagine if they’d found the poor giant sloth first. It might’ve killed off the whole endeavor.

Saber-toothed condoms – that would be funny, Steve thinks right now, ringing up a key ring shaped like a miniature saber-toothed tiger. If you asked him now, he’d say no one has much to offer the world. The feeling that you do is created by teams of marketers to get you to buy their shit.)

People come to the tar pits just to see the iconic cat skulls. They often stand in front of the display silently for a long, long time. Smilodon fatalis – even the Latin is sharpened. They do not notice Anna Belle dry mopping behind them or emptying trash or Mrs Youngblood walking by, a wash of distracted fifth graders following her. They do not notice Kelvin standing in the corner, texting.

A single saber-toothed tiger still inhabits the tar pits. It is a solitary creature, as it was when it was alive, and it sits in the wall between the men’s and women’s rest rooms, watching people come and go, knowing that it is not seeing prey, knowing that it is not alive, but not sure what it is.

The rest of the saber-toothed cats sometimes roar in the distance. This last cat ignores them. When it was alive, it was very different from the rest of them, and that served it well, so it does not follow the voices, but sits in the wall, waiting to be hungry again.

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