This is my 31 sentence story (written just for fun as I am a contributor to the prizes I am not eligible to win anything!) a fun writing challenge by Hive account@tristancarax.

You can enter though! Check out the rules and the prompt here: @tristancarax/the-31-sentence-contest-round-20

Basically you need to write the story with a certain number of words in each sentence. This week the sequence is:

27, 30, 5, 14, 3, 29, 11, 31, 19, 4, 24, 12, 13, 22, 6, 25, 20, 8, 16, 17, 23, 26, 21, 9, 18, 7, 10, 2, 28, 1, 15

So sentence one should contain precisely twenty seven words, the second sentence thirty etc, etc.

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The dinosaur roared and Billy felt the ground shake as the beast began to march towards him, smashing its tail into tree trunks, cracking them in two.

“We need to get out of here,” Mary said in a voice that sounded soft and calm, even though she was shouting to make herself heard above the dreadful noise. Her hand grabbed Billy’s wrist. He tried to keep up with Mary who always outran him in the playground.

“Faster than that!”

Mary’s nails dug into the flesh of his wrist, and he winced at the pain, as she dragged him towards the cave on the other side of the playground. He could feel the dinosaur’s hot, moist, breath on his neck.

Suddenly, they were inside the cave, the sound of dinosaur’s roar echoing around the stone cavern, its teeth snapping shut on the empty space where Billy had been an instant before. Mary dragged Billy further into the cave until, finally, they stood with their back to the cold rock, panting.

The dinosaur roared again.

“I don’t think you should have opened that box,” Billy puffed, finally convinced they were - for the moment at least - safe from the dinosaur.

“Opening the box wasn’t the problem,” Mary said, her arms crossed tight.

“How did I know you weren’t supposed to give the baby lizard biscuits?”

“Because it said on the box, ‘do not feed the baby lizard’ in big letters,” Mary said, a frown on her face

“It was only a little biscuit.”

“It was only a tiny lizard until you fed it the little biscuit,” Mary’s voice was barely a whisper, but Billy could hear the anger.

Billy put his hand into his coat pocket as all the talk of biscuits reminded him he had some left.

“What are we going to do now, Mary?”

Mary shook her head as Billy offered her a broken and battered biscuit from the packet.

“I guess we’ll have to wait and see if it goes away, or shrink to normal size.”

Billy nodded and chewed the biscuit, slowly, wondering if his mum would be cross with him for giving his food to a lizard. She was always telling him not to waste his food and he was fairly sure she wouldn’t approve of a dinosaur eating food meant for him.

The dinosaur withdrew its head from the cave and Billy could hear the sound of its tail swishing around the playground.

“I think it might go away now,” Billy said.

Mary nodded and took a step forward towards the entrance of the cave, and then took another one.

“What are you doing?” Billy asked, anxiously.

“I’m going to see if it has gone,” Mary said. “Wait there.”

Mary was older and wiser - and braver - than him so Billy stuffed another biscuit into his mouth, chewing as he watched Mary edge her way into the light.

“Noooooooooo!”

Billy screamed as the dinosaur took hold of Mary and bit her cleanly in two.

...

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