Pre-Death

by Sara Chou

Life. It's so unfair. Why do things have to happen the way they do? Like in a raffle, when one person buys a thousand tickets, and another person buys just one, the person that just buys one wins the grand prize. Or when you're walking up on stage to do some important speech and you trip and fall flat on your face and everyone laughs. I was in the exact same situation, although, for me, it was slightly different.
Things were going so well with my cat fossil collection and my plan to become the most powerful paleontologist ever. I already had a sheep, a dog, and a coyote. Now I was working on finding the left foot, the ear, and the tail of a cat and my collection would be complete. I had found them in just seven years, which was pretty unbelievable, considering the fact that it took most experienced animal paleontologists about one year to find just a couple of bones even. But I guess my luck was too good to be true. Since Dr. Steven Dellmar had to show up and ruin my life. Paleontology was basically my life. It was all I ever did, besides eat and sleep.
My laboratory was in what used to be called "Puerto Rico" and lately, there were no new items to be stored there. Although I have found some horse legs, that's not what I'm looking for! So anyways, where were we? Oh yeah, Dr. Dellmar. He and I used to work for the same company, but things didn't work out, so I quit, and started my own very successful--if I can say so myself-- business. Before he quit, and started his own business, I was the most famous paleontologist in the world. The only real competition I had at the time was him--Dr. Steven Dellmar--and another paleontologist, Dr. James Harkins. But Dr. James Harkins died of leukemia because he didn't want to take the medication. So that left Dr. Dellmar. After James died, I found out from my sources that Dr. Dellmar (DD from now on) had a full cat, and some EXTRA bones, probably from another species of cat, and he had all the rest of the animals I had, except for the dog. He was missing half of the dog. I was first and DD was second. I kind of thought tha,t sooner or later, DD would win this contest. I just didn't know it would be sooner.

FIVE YEARS LATER

When they first told me that I was no longer the best, I was infuriated, enraged and basically an out of control lunatic since I was acting so unreasonably insane. I didn't know how this could have happened to me. I had spent so much time, so much money, so much effort on this project, and at the end it was all going to WASTE?! How bogus is that? Before DD had found everything, I had found everything except my/the tail. After February I hadn't found anything. And that was eight months ago. So anyways, one of my faithful employees, Dr. Ryan McIntire comes to me and tells me that my life is over (not exactly but you should know what I mean). Then, three days later I saw it for myself, pictures--everywhere, newspapers, cereal boxes, magazines, T.V., billboards, blimps, bus-ads, even on T-shirts!--of Dr. Steven Dellmar and his findings, which, basically remind me of what I loser I am. And one of the worst things is that the day after, I finally found the cat's tail. Even though it was too late.

THE END