Bible Stories for Adults Read Online Free PDF Page B

promised to be nice to each other. It seems immoral, somehow, to bind a biosphere to anything so chancy as the emotional ups and downs of an American family.”
    Although we should have interpreted our daughter’s fish and lizards as harbingers of things to come, the arrival of the dinosaurs still took us by surprise. But there they were, actual Jurassic dinosaurs, thousands of them, galumphing around on Zenobia like she was a remake of
King Kong.
How we loved to watch the primordial drama now unfolding at the far end of Asa’s microscope: fierce tyrannosaurs pouncing on their prey, flocks of pterodactyls floating through her troposphere like organic 747s (though they were not truly dinosaurs, Asa explained), herds of amiable duckbills sauntering through our baby’s marshes. This was the supreme science project, the ultimate electric train set, a flea circus directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
    â€œI’m worried about her,” Asa told me a month after Zenobia’s dinosaurs evolved. “The pH of her precipitation is 4.2 when it should be 5.6.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œIt should be 5.6.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    â€œI’m talking about acid rain, Dad. I’m talking about Zenobia’s lakes becoming as dead as the moon.”
    â€œAcid rain?” I said. “How could that be? She doesn’t even have people.”
    â€œI know, Dad, but
we
do.”
    Â 
    â€œSad news,” I wrote in
Down to Earth.
“Maybe if Asa hadn’t been away at computer camp, things would have gone differently.”
    It was the Fourth of July. We’d invited a bunch of families over for a combination potluck supper and volleyball tournament in the north pasture, and the farm was soon swarming with bored, itchy children. I suspect that a gang of them wandered into the baby’s room and, mistaking her for some sort of toy, carried her outside. At this point, evidently, the children got an idea. A foolish, perverse, wicked idea.
    They decided to take Zenobia into the basset barn.
    The awful noise—a blend of kids laughing, hounds baying, and a biosphere screaming—brought Polly and me on the run. My first impression was of some bizarre and incomprehensible athletic event, a sport played in hell or in the fantasies of an opium eater. Then I saw the truth: the dogs had captured our daughter. Yes, there they were, five bitches and a dozen pups, clumsily batting her around the barn with their snouts, oafishly pinning her under their paws. They scratched her ice caps, chewed on her islands, lapped up her oceans.
    â€œDaddy, get them off me!” Zenobia cried, rolling amid the clouds of dust and straw. “Get them off!”
    â€œHelp her!” screamed Polly.
    â€œMommy! Daddy!”
    I jumped into the drooling dogpile, punching the animals in their noses, knocking them aside with my knees. Somehow I got my hands around our baby’s equator, and with a sudden tug I freed her from the mass of soggy fur and slavering tongues. Pressing her against my chest, I ran blindly from the barn.
    Tooth marks dotted Zenobia’s terrain like meteor craters. Her largest continent was fractured in five places. Her crust leaked crude oil, her mountains vomited lava.
    But the worst of it was our daughter’s unshakable realization that a great loss had occurred. “Where are my dinosaurs?” she shrieked. “I can’t feel my dinosaurs!”
    â€œThere, there, Zenobia,” I said.
    â€œThey’ll be okay,” said Polly.
    â€œThey’re g-gone,” wailed Zenobia. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, they’re
gone!
”
    I rushed our baby into the nursery and positioned her under Asa’s rig. An extinction: true, all horribly true. Zenobia’s swamps were empty; her savannas were bereft of prehistoric life; not a single vertebrate scurried through her forests.
    She was inconsolable. “My apatosaurs,” she groaned. “Where are