The crowd was covered in florescent purple chunks, the color of radioactive vomit. “It’s never gotten sick before, I swear.” The small man in the white sports jacket started wiping some of the purple ooze off the TV producer’s jacket.

“Get off me you bumbling idiot. I don’t know who or how anyone allowed you to get financing for such a stupid show, but I can assure you for the embarrassment you have caused me as well as the entire station, this program’s funding will cease.” The producer turned almost sliding on a giant bubble, but instead it popped like a teenager’s pimple casting a final insult into the face of Rubert. No one noticed as he was left wiping off his glasses.

“Did it even occur to you that this was important?” he asked. The scene pulls back, shifts, and comes close up on a giant purple dinosaur with an oversized, goofy smile on his face. It wiggled, and started to hum a familiar tune. “I needed you to be on your best behavior, you’ve been a very bad purple dinosaur today.”

His eyes stretched as large as his face in a blink designed to swallow the whole world. The sweat rolled down his face and pooled below his chest in the obese river formed by the fission of breast and stomach. He needed a glass of water. It had only been two years, he thought. He needed a glass of water. It was only just a break. Everything would pull together, he thought. He needed a glass of water. Rupert got out of bed and farted. He had eaten eggs for all three meals yesterday. Breakfast was an omelet, lunch was scrambled eggs, and dinner was birdie in the nest, his favorite. The room stunk like a funeral for a gangrened paper-mill. Rupert’s face lit up with pride.

“If I throw my entire weight onto the device maybe it could stop the thing?” he said aloud to the empty room. He held the cup of water up to the unshaded bulb and said a prayer to the oblong beaker. Tiny organisms engendered through filth, or should I say lack of cleanliness, began mating rituals as soon as they realized they were about to be imbibed. A great truth revealed, they fucked despite the potential for viable offspring. “Now if only there was a way to prove the existence of love?” thought Rupert as he drank. “If I could remove the pleasure sensors from them, provide them with foreknowledge of their death as well as that of their offspring, perhaps then, if they mated.”

“Why had the immaturity of the dinosaur threatened the producer so much? Surely the disrespect of an animal, especially one without responsible parents can’t be held accountable for their actions.” Rupert wrote, sometimes when he got his nightmares down on paper it caused them to go away. Puerile actions engender death. The death motif lifts a smile to the mouth of any God fearing man,” he wrote. Rupert wasn’t afraid of God. He soon was back on the bed again, so tired his eyes were nailed shut.

The room was all wires and tubes, except for an oversized crib in the corner, blue for a boy. Even though the big purple dinosaur had male genitals, he always acted as though there was a vagina down there instead. A touch of feminism in everything he did.

Then, a knock at the door, “TV producer, open up immediately,” said a voice. What was going on? Yesterday wasn’t so horrible, he had proven that the dinosaur could develop a higher range of consciousness, perhaps the producers could use the technology. The children’s shows of the world deploying cheerful purple dinosaurs…Saturday mornings would have been a sure thing for the network.

Rupert opened the door. Four men entered, one of them was the producer who had been there for yesterday’s demonstration. “Gentlemen,” said Rupert, but they pushed him out of the way.

“Hold him,” said the captain. He walked straight up to the dinosaur’s crib. He began to hum his song, and smile like an idiot as he often did when he was scared.

“What are you doing?” asked Rupert, frenetically.

“This program is formally cancelled,” he said. He picked the humming dinosaur by it’s tail. The dinosaur shook, still smiling like an idiot. The dinosaur wasn’t scared about what was to be done to it, it was scared that it had so fallen in love with the repetitive blade it knew it would have to be closed to it. Was the blade its mother? The captain set the dinosaur on the ground in front of it.

Rupert screamed.

The dinosaur gently placed it’s tender purple neck under the guillotine.

The same radioactive purple vomit shot onto the laughing face of the television producer.

“The world will know his name,” said Rupert. I will create a show on another network in his honor.

They will call him…Barney.

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