This is a short piece, but it doesn't really live up to the term "short story". It's a little bit fragmented; I'm not fond of the dialogue, in particular. Harsh criticism welcome, of course.
EDIT: Changed the title, as of Yoda's review. This was previously Extinction, if you're wondering.
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It was a well-known fact that he kept a dinosaur in his attic.
They say it wasn’t just a skeletal figurine with plastic bones of ebony, or a shapeless hunk of rock. Its eyes, they whisper, were like pools of leaking ink, soaking into the paper that gave them life. “Was it alive?” ask the children, but they don’t know. He never mentioned his dinosaur, not to them, and they certainly never asked.
Aside from them, it seems that few ever saw the dinosaur in the attic. Information is traded for a silver coin on the black market, but as yet all pockets remain empty and inquisitive minds, unsatisfied. Only one eyewitness account has ever been recorded, taken from the cold white rooms of imprisonment. About him, they say only that his arms were mottled with scars of self-loathing and that his hands, bound, twitched like dying bluebottles with crushed wings.
The account has been paraphrased over the years, and current versions are accompanied by frothing at the mouth. Toothpaste, they mutter knowingly. But it began on a warm autumn morning, when the sun was pale and bleary-eyed and the leaves had shrivelled to wrinkled fingers. A boy had gone to see his grandfather, with a single mission in mind: when he left his grandfather’s, he would know the truth about the dinosaur in the attic.
“Grandfather,” he said in wheedling tones, “I want to see the dinosaur.”
The boy’s grandfather stared wordlessly at a gold medallion, hanging on a protruding nail. When he spoke, his voice was rusted with weariness.
“What’s the magic word?”
The solemnity of the question, and its simplicity, threw the boy.
“Please?” he stammered, the word sticking in his throat. But his grandfather nodded to the rhythm of an antique clock. As the clock chimed and the dancing ladies twirled, he opened the door to the attic.
What the boy saw there varies from storyteller to storyteller. They speak only of the eyes, but others say that the waxy sunlight fell on poised claws and rugged teeth. There were scales, feathers, tails and several heads, and as the boy gulped one turned to him and roared.
The old man is long since dead and his grandson, forgotten, but the dinosaur remains. Recent investigations uncovered an old photograph, neglected by family and lost amongst cardboard boxes and dust. The photo shows a room, an attic, filled with rarities and souvenirs – a model of the RMS Titanic, made entirely from matchsticks; an old-fashioned beret; a charm bracelet; a wedding ring. A deep gash runs down a wooden tabletop.
There is no dinosaur in the attic.
