Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Read Online Free Page A

cooled. The moon rose. Frogs made their early evening chucking noises. A giant damselfly pulled a big spider out of its web and bit it in half, dropping the head and legs and devouring the rest.
    By the next day the visitors were again anxiety-free. In the morning they putt-putted back ashore in their small boat, and scooped and chipped away at the bank of rock. Fragments piled up and were sifted. The sifters complained.
    Kay, reclining in the shade with her back to the work, looked entranced. “And I thought the Mississippi was something,” she mused to her companions, who kept working, pouring sweat. In the afternoon, everyone returned to the bigger boat and slept like lizards on the deck in the heat, heads or arms sprawled over one another.
    I decided to spend more time on the bottom of the lagoon. I was alternately appalled and bemused by my need to spy. I got the sulks. I kept my distance.
    Over the years I’d been continuously taken aback by the ingenuity with which I could disappoint myself.
    I heard a splash.
    Kay swam on her back away from the boat in my direction, cutting widening wake-lines into the sunlight above her. I watched her cruise by. I left the bottom, and swam on my back beneath her for a stretch, as if her reflection.
    When she stopped, I sank lower into the murk. She turned, did somersaults; played, in some obscure way. Resting, she treaded water.
    I ascended and drifted a talon into one of her kicking legs, which jerked upwards. I dove. She dove. Vegetative murk billowed up around us. She surfaced, and swam back to the boat. Suddenly ferocious, I followed. It was an exciting race, which I lost. She climbed a ladder out just ahead of my arrival.
    Braced on the bottom in the ooze, I took the keel and uprooted it with both arms. Tons of displaced water surged and rocked. On the deck above, boxes slid and smashed and shinbones barked against wheelhouses.
    I climbed up a convenient rope to give them a look. They each produced individualized noises of consternation. I made my peccary snarl and backhanded a lantern hanging on the rail into the water. Everyone held up their favorite rifle and I dove back in.
    I surfaced on the other side of the boat. “The lantern must have frightened him,” Kay said. In the middle of the afternoon.
    Within minutes, two men came after me, with little masks on their faces and breathing tubes in their mouths. Bubbles bubbled from their heads. Back in the deep reeds, I watched them churn by overhead, a body’s length away, and then swam the other direction. I backstroked through the weeds. They seemed to have trouble following. I did an underwater plié. They spotted me. Their legs thrashed and pounded inefficiently. More bubbles bubbled. This went on for some time.
    And again the next day they went about their business.
    I kept being drawn to them and their leaking hippo-belly of a boat.
    This whole thing had affected me. My eye glands were secreting. I rubbed my face on tree bark. I urinated on my feet.
    Normally for me the geologic periods came and went, and normally I had the tender melancholic patience of a floodplain, but with them in the lagoon I found myself foolish and hopeful, carp-toothed. I was a creature of two minds, one of them as unteachable as the swamp. I wanted to make this signal event a signal event. I wanted to become something.
    To them I was the unknown Amazon embodied— who knew what lay undiscovered in those hidden backwaters?— and still they lounged and chatted. They flirted. They acted as if they were home.
    At midday, one wilted crewmember stood guard. He exchanged vacant stares with a cotton-topped tamarin eating its stew of bugs and tree gum on a shoreline branch. The rest of the group squabbled below deck.
    I hauled myself back up the rope—why didn’t they just pull up the rope?—and schlumped past the porthole while they argued. I was dripping all over the planking. I grabbed the crewmember by both sides of his head and toppled us