Free Pterodactyls! by David Halliday Page A

squawk until it occurred to them that unlike the gargoyle s they kept company with, they were alive and they could fly. And so they flung themselves about in any direction, blind, until their sail wings carried them heavenwards, where they wheeling about the sky in great silent arcs. They scattered on different roof tops, completely without goal or purpose and blinded by a love for something they could not name or see. They were driven mad by this futile pursuit. They believed they were incomplete as pterodactyls but didn’t know how or why.
    The sporadic behavior in ‘The Birds’ (as they were referred to first by The Village Voice then the Times , followed by the rest of NYC) confounded the NYPD, who were immediately ordered to cease firing their service weapons in the air as the volley of bursts was frightening office workers. And since the pterodactyls were attacking no one, the police were unsure how to respond, other than to call the zoo, resulting only in repeated awkward conversations that benefitted no one. 
    The pterodactyls existed as every other nook and brick and steel beam in the city existed. They were carelessly left there, they were incidental, they slowly became forgotten and ignored, abused by a careless city of individuals acting alone.
    The world was a world of reactions, not purposeful decisions.
    The city itself was not the result of some great master plan, but rather a mess of now forgotten ambitions. All components of the visible city had been built by ambitious men and women long dead, and left there like abandoned cars. It was a place of accident, rather than design. And so the city absorbed the pterodactyls without great fuss, simply as new additions to the skyline.
    It was only when a pterodactyl interrupted Woody Allen’s clarinet performance one Monday night at the Carlyle hotel on East 76 th street that things took a turn for the worse. Sitting in the audience was none other than Tommy Lee Jones, listening to Woody’s exploration of sound as he routinely did every Monday.
    A brief word about Tommy Lee Jones : Actor Tommy Lee Jones loathed being disturbed from any of his few pleasures in life and had long since viewed other humans as an elusive and disappointing ‘other’ far from himself, disheartening and disgusting. They were something which once held great potential for development but had since proved a dismal failure. When Tommy Lee was a boy, his dreams varied little from those of every other child growing up in the 50s. He dreamed of hovering cars, bubble houses in the sky, lunar cities, laser ray guns, robot servants, and moving walkways. It was in this idealised future world that the young Tommy Lee Jones intended on living out most of his adult life as a sheriff or US Marshall, something really tough , on the outer fringes of space where lawlessness was rampant and the District Attorney wasn’t watching over his shoulder. He would deal with intergalactic criminals in the manner he saw fit, which was with a merciless iron fist! But as he lived through decade after dreaming decade, his future space-world never eventuated. Jones held the frailty and stupidity of the human race as directly responsible.  Human disenchantment had disenchanted him and now the task fell to him to disenchant others through the art and beauty of acting.
    In the midst of one of Tommy Lee Jones’s favourite reveries at the Carlyle Hotel, where he dreamed of a post apocalyptic world where he and Woody Allen were the last remaining people and all they had to survive on was his wits, hardness of character, and Woody’s clarinet music, a pterodactyl blindly and mindlessly burst through the doors of the Carlyle auditorium. Its blank bird eye was locked wide open in permanent panic, constantly surprised as all birds are surprised.  Tommy Lee Jones had had enough. This bizarre tolerance by the State and City of New York had led to the crime of him being nudged from one of his few minutes of pleasure.
    At the