When she woke up the dinosaur was still there.
In Monterroso's short story (as brief as the blink of an eye), the promise of an action that is about to take place/the suggestion of an action that just took place (or both, since the two characters are seized in the moment and the reader is propelled into this story in medias res), proves to be sufficient for any reader to engage with this most mysterious encounter between a person and a dinosaur. It doesn't really matter whether the encounter between this human being (is it a human being?) and a long-extinct animal was brief, frightening, life-altering or absurd. Any encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot, and is therefore immediately subjected to the laws of fiction - regardless of whether we face these laws (and this dinosaur) in reality or in a fictional realm.
There are two ways to tackle this fictitious dinosaur: either the first character woke up to realize that the dinosaur of his dreams was still there, or the dinosaur character is capable of a visionary thinking about its own evolution, straight into the future of Homo Sapiens. This Homo Sapiens sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, in the company of the dinosaur. And when he wakes up, the dinosaur is still there.
Indeed, in both cases the dinosaur is still and persistently there, and one is compelled to think: what would this dinosaur have thought when Homo Sapiens awoke - when it looked the awakened creature into the eyes and saw the future, staring back in disbelief?
In Monterroso's short story (as brief as the blink of an eye), the promise of an action that is about to take place/the suggestion of an action that just took place (or both, since the two characters are seized in the moment and the reader is propelled into this story in medias res), proves to be sufficient for any reader to engage with this most mysterious encounter between a person and a dinosaur. It doesn't really matter whether the encounter between this human being (is it a human being?) and a long-extinct animal was brief, frightening, life-altering or absurd. Any encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot, and is therefore immediately subjected to the laws of fiction - regardless of whether we face these laws (and this dinosaur) in reality or in a fictional realm.
There are two ways to tackle this fictitious dinosaur: either the first character woke up to realize that the dinosaur of his dreams was still there, or the dinosaur character is capable of a visionary thinking about its own evolution, straight into the future of Homo Sapiens. This Homo Sapiens sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, in the company of the dinosaur. And when he wakes up, the dinosaur is still there.
Indeed, in both cases the dinosaur is still and persistently there, and one is compelled to think: what would this dinosaur have thought when Homo Sapiens awoke - when it looked the awakened creature into the eyes and saw the future, staring back in disbelief?
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