I was profoundly affected by this story and it's taken me awhile to formulate my thoughts on it.
This is a very queer story, not that it could only apply to queer people, but that it will certainly resonate with them. The narrator and her love are declared to be a woman and a man respectively, but the violent assault is at least partially propelled by homophobia and transmisogyny, suggesting that they are not gender-conforming. As soon as that paragraph began, I inwardly went "ohh. i get it now". Until that point, like most people, I thought this was a mediocre lighthearted parody, since the whole thing does read fancifully, indeed reminiscent of the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
However, once it is placed into context, the first part of the story re-resolves itself into an eloquent expression of a feeling that is instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever feared for the life of their loved ones in the way that all queer people are forced too. It is a yearning for their great inner strength to be transformed into outward, for the rest of the world to see them with the awe and wonder that you see them with, that they deserve.
This is in fact one of the most serious and realistic stories we've had on EscapePod in a long time, because of the thing that makes people question whether it belongs here at all - that it is told in hypothetical. It is a story about how and why an ordinary person would come up with a story about being in love with a dinosaur. I am surprised that for many people that was not an easily relatable feeling.