Meet Cassie. All she wants in life is to get her feet wet, and perhaps a fish or two. Yes, she would really like fish. Do you have some?

The tips of her clawed toes softly scratched stone as she walked. Her head tilted this way and that, like a lizard, large eyes wide as she stared at the straight, dead trees and clean, flat ground. Shiny loops and ledges stuck out from smooth, white walls. Stone? She sniffed the air. Stinging, acidic, not natural, but underneath it was the scent of warm earth.
Picasso continued his routine patrol of the fence with all the decorum of a peacock. Each step deliberate so that not a single scrubby twig shifted, his fur-like feathers barely brushing against the wire grid too high to jump. Dry ferns and prickly scrub grew through the mesh at the foot of the fence, but ahead there was an emptiness in the dense line of browning vegetation. And the fence…the fence was gone!
Sunlight streamed through the tangled layers of conifer branches and palm fronds to pierce the eternal twilight of the undergrowth. A cloud of tiny, reflective wings coiled like mist in the shaft of light, the thin whine of their hanging flight almost drowned by the whirring, buzzing, drumming, chirping of countless other unseen insects. Alien cries from leather-winged creatures called from above, answered and challenged by a cacophony of voices that clicked, whooped, hollered, whistled…any and every sound fighting to be heard through air so dense with foliage and humidity, constant moisture clung to the leaves and dripped to the black forest floor.
Patricia shut the gate behind her and scanned the paddock, but the small shed in the corner was empty, and nothing stirred in the grove of thick palms surrounding it. She pulled her supply wagon closer to the plastic feed bucket hanging on the fence line, and reached into a large canvas bag for a heaping scoopful of pellets. She dumped them into the bucket and tapped the plastic sides with the scoop.
“Rosie!” She tapped the bucket a few more times before jabbing the scoop into the feed bag.
Ajax is big, heavy, and always hungry. He’s got a knack for sniffing out treats and getting into places he shouldn’t. He really didn’t think things through when he squeezed into the shed that one time… Continue reading
The little ballerina princess shivered as she stared up the sidewalk to Uncle Pete’s house. Tombstones rose up through the dense fog, and bones littered the ground. She nudged a giant rib with her toe, clutched her goodie bag and ribboned wand tightly, and stepped forward.
I have a confession to make. I always assumed that Juramaia was tiny. The reconstructions make it look a bit like a rat, and the modern-day comparisons are always to shrews. So she’s basically a prehistoric squirrel-rat-thing right?
I was wrong!