For the Love of Truth

The result of the prompt, “There was a dinosaur in the fridge.” Though Brian and Trudy live in Springfield, neither of them have superpowers. This story takes place several years down the road in their relationship; in most of the stories they aren’t married yet.

There was a dinosaur in the fridge. More accurately, there were sixteen of them, carefully vacuum-sealed and covered in plastic, all shoved into a little cardboard box.

Brian Branch was rather unsettled by this.

To be clear, he wasn’t at all unsettled by the dinosaurs themselves—ever since Trudy had gotten pregnant, there was always a box of the oddly-shaped chicken nuggets to be found in their freezer. It was by far the oddest craving Brian had ever heard about, and it didn’t appear anywhere in his stack of helpful parenting books. But then, when had anything about their lives been normal?

No, the problem was, this wasn’t the freezer. It was the fridge, and didn’t she know that these things could go bad after a couple days if they weren’t properly cooled? Did she want to give their unborn children food poisoning?

He picked up the offending box and opened the freezer, intent on returning it to its proper place next to three other identical boxes which were neatly stacked between the toaster pastries on one side and the gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream on the other. Brian took a moment to enjoy the utter orderliness of the freezer, if for no other reason than it was the only place in the house where he could find things in the same place he put them anymore.

Except for the renegade box of dinosaur chicken, anyway. There was no room for it in the freezer. Utterly stymied by this failing of his organizational system, he looked down at the cartoony packaging as one would an explosive device.

Brian took a moment to steel himself, taking a deep breath before closing the freezer door, dinosaurs still in hand. For a second he just stood there, staring at the eggshell-white surface with his back to the kitchen, trying to pretend that everything was this nice and clean.

He knew better.

With a sigh, he finally turned and faced the sight of a kitchen so messy it looked more like one of his students’ Algebra binders. Things were strewn all over the place—makings for ice cream sundaes were spread haphazardly across the small table, between piles of papers from his Algebra II class that had once been neatly stacked, and were now skewed and slightly sticky. Dishes were piled in the sink (Brian looked away before he had to battle his insatiable need to scrub them all immediately); the dishwasher was open, revealing rows of color-coordinated sippy cups, pacifiers, and washable play toys. The fact that none of them had been used yet didn’t matter; Brian had read the consumer reports about all the germs that lived in department stores. Those things were getting washed at least twice before any child of his used them.

A muffled thump from the direction of the living room sounded. Hesitantly, Brian moved out of the kitchen, ducking under the drying laundry strung across the doorway. “Trudy?”

He tripped over a stack of new parenting magazines two steps in, the chicken nuggets going flying. As he picked himself up off the floor (they really needed a new vacuum, he could see crumbs in the carpet, for heaven’s sake!), he had a fleeting sense of vertigo as he realized that this was what the house looked like before Trudy gave birth to triplets.

It took him a moment to locate the box of dinosaurs, over by the couch.

Then his gaze fell to what was on the couch, and he suddenly found himself a lot less worried about decomposing chicken nuggets.

Trudy was sound asleep, one side of her face pressed into the arm of the couch, her red hair a complete mess. She’d tipped slightly in her sleep, as she tended to do these days, so that her back was pressed against the couch in a subconscious attempt to straighten out her protesting spine. Her feet, which had started out laying on the ever-present ice packs for her ankles, were now pointing in opposite directions. One was resting on the carpet, and Brian couldn’t help but notice that the sock was inside out.

Their lives really were getting out of control.

Still, she was beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful he’d ever seen her. She never believed him when he told her that; she’d look down at her stomach (which was now approximately the size of a Volkswagen) and bemoan the loss of her figure and her ever increasing waistline. As far as Brian was concerned, he was looking at all four of his favorite people in the same place, and that view was hard to beat.

His gaze drifted back to the floor, and for the first time he noticed that the dinosaurs weren’t alone. A bowl of half-melted ice cream sat within arm’s reach of the couch. Brian realized with horror that there were three scoops in the bowl, which meant that she’d left the empty carton in the freezer. Something inside his chest clenched terribly, and he took a deep breath to calm himself.

Pick your battles, he chanted to himself, taking his therapy to heart. There are more important things. There are bigger messes. There are… it wasn’t working. You’re going to go insane, but it’ll probably be worth it.

He reached out to pick up the bowl, intent on putting it in the sink, washing it along with all the other dishes in the sink, and then putting the freshly washed dishes into their neatly color-coded cupboard homes.

That was when he saw the book. It was splayed open, leaning partly against the couch, its pages getting bent from its own weight. This was the source of the sound he’d heard, then. Trudy must have dropped it when she fell asleep—or, more likely, she’d had it balanced on her stomach and it had just slid off.

If there was one thing Brian hated more than room-temperature chicken nuggets (and to be fair, that ranked high on his list of things he hated), it was a book with bent pages. Without any kind of conscious decision, he scooped up the poor mangled paperback and smoothed out the cover with his hands. It was only then that he read the title.

“Baby names?” he murmured thoughtfully, looking at his sleeping wife’s face. They’d agreed to talk about names next month; apparently, Trudy was getting a head start. Unable to resist, he found the handful of pages marked with bright green sticky notes and opened up to the first one.

Trudy had helpfully highlighted the ones she liked. Though why she liked Bartholomew, he had no idea. Or Barbara. Or Bradley. It sounded like she was casting for a soap opera. Why not name one Blanche and get it over with?

Momentarily forgetting about the chicken (an admittedly big step for him), he settled onto the floor and flipped through her other selections, aware that he’d never get away with this if she was awake to stop him. Her other choices were equally alarming to him. Lance? Lillith? Laurence?

“Oh,” he breathed out with horrified understanding. Oh, she was picking triplet names. She wanted them to be those horrible parents who gave all of their children matching names, because apparently having two identical siblings didn’t single you out for enough playground mockery and enforced togetherness already.

Brian was willing to admit that he might have some latent bitterness from his own playground experiences to deal with. Still, Lillith was a really terrible name.

He looked through her other highlighted selections with a quick eye, unable to bear any more psychological trauma. Wendy, Wesley, Willard. He put the book down and stared at it, slightly green around the gills. Then he saw that he’d missed a marked page; he’d only read from six pages, but there were seven sticky notes. With a kind of resignation that can only be achieved by an OCD man who couldn’t leave a sticky note un-looked at, he opened the book again.

There was only one name highlighted on the page. He let his finger trace it. “Oliver,” he said thoughtfully. Then he said it again, as if getting used to the weight of the word on his tongue. “Oliver. Oliver Branch.”

That wasn’t bad. Quite good, actually. Classy. He smiled despite himself. “Oliver Branch,” he proclaimed to the empty air of the messy living room. It was an odd moment of peace in the chaos of married life and expected parenthood. He let himself feel it, a kind of contentment that ran bone-deep. Maybe, he thought, this was something of fatherhood.

Then his eyes focused on the now absolutely uneatable, defrosted, no doubt slightly soggy box of dinosaur chicken nuggets on the floor. His shudder of revulsion shook him out of his pleasant stupor. With a heavy sigh, Brian stood, leaving the book where it had landed. He scooped up the melted ice cream and went to the kitchen to find his trusty rubber gloves. The box was probably contaminated; he’d have to put it in the outside garbage to keep Trudy clear of the impending salmonella outbreak.

Mission in mind, Brian set about his task. Parenthood phantoms would just have to wait. Sometimes, you just had to deal with the dinosaurs in the fridge first.