The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff Read Free Book Online Page A

found a huge old tee shirt, and went downstairs. My mother turned from the kitchen counter with a raw chicken breast in her hands, and smiled uncertainly at me. "She's up," she said, her voice rough, as if she'd just awoken herself. "Sleeping Beauty. You were out for thirty-six hours. I had to hold a mirror above you to make sure you were breathing."
    "Was I?" I said.
    "Barely," she said. She stuffed the breast with a heady mixture of cilantro, feta, jalapenos. "You've missed all the hoopla. It's very exciting." She nodded toward the television, where on the screen a newscaster was flushed with excitement, gibbering on mute and gesturing toward the monster rotting on camera, its delicate hand curled on its chest--a large, yellow, lumpy thing looking not unlike a half-submerged ball of butter. Behind him was the bronze statue of the Mohican and his dog. Lakefront Park. My mother smiled, expectant.
    "Oh. You mean the monster," I said. "I know. I was there when they brought it in."
    Vi looked surprised, then frowned, as if I'd refused a gift she'd put a great deal of thought into, and turned back to her chicken breasts, arranging them in pink, gelatinous mounds on the tray. Her iron cross clinked against the counter. I watched as a new newscaster began interviewing a scientist: DR. HERMAN KWAN, the banner read below him, WORLD-FAMOUS VERTEBRATE BIOLOGIST. I turned up the volume.
    "The world," the newscaster said, biting into his words as if they were crackers, "is waiting with bated breath--no pun intended, baited, ha--to know what, exactly, the people of Templeton, New York, towed in yesterday morning from Lake Glimmerglass. What can you tell us, Dr. Kwan?"
    "I don't, well," said the biologist, straightening and restraightening his glasses with his thumb. He was sweating under the limelight, great bags of wet darkening the armpits of his shirt. "To be perfectly honest, I don't think we're able to say, yet. To say, really. It's just. Well, beautiful. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen," and here he blinked rapidly with emotion. "It is an historic day."
    "Historic?" said the newscaster to the camera, crunching, crunching. "Dr. Kwan, please explain to our viewers why?"
    "Well, Peter, we haven't had a discovery of this magnitude. Well, since fishermen caught a new species of coelacanth off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia. 1938. A living dinosaur. An animal that had totally disappeared off the fossil record for eighty million years. Then we found it again! But, then again, this discovery in Lake Glimmerglass might be far greater than even that. We have simply no idea as yet what the animal. Well, even what it is. It may be a new species entirely. It may not even have a fossil record!" And the biologist gave a bark of a laugh.
    "That's truly incredible, incredible. Professor Kwan, some of our viewers would like to know if this find is possibly 'the missing link.' What do you believe?" said the newscaster with great gravity.
    The biologist seemed to struggle with this, and his mouth worked for a moment as he thought.
    In the silence, my mother said, almost so low that I didn't hear her, "Sunshine, I have something I need to tell you."
    I waited, but she said nothing more, and the biologist finally spluttered to life. "Sorry?" he said. "But the missing link between what and what?"
    "Oh," the newscaster said, struggling. "Between fish and, I suppose, well...nonfish?"
    The biologist wiped his forehead, and a rose of moisture bloomed upon his chest. "Well, I don't know what that means. But maybe. It's far too early to tell," he said.
    Then the newscaster said thank you, the camera cut away, and another reporter came on to interview the mayor of our town, a portly fellow with a penchant for ornamental canes and too-short shorts, a man with a voice so stentorious it seemed to boom up from the earth beneath his feet. "We in Templeton," he was saying, "have always had a myth about a monster that lived in Lake Glimmerglass, Glimmey we