Sea Monkeys by Kris Saknussemm

Author:Kris Saknussemm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2012-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

THE FLAMINGO CONSPIRACY

If you’d been going to classes with the same kids, boys and girls together the whole time—what would you think if one morning Mrs. Kremser ushered all the girls out of the multipurpose room and Mr. Wallace ordered all the boys into the gym?

Would it worry you if your routine of building California missions out of sugar cubes and inflating flabby wet chunks of cow lungs with Sweetheart straws was suddenly interrupted by a forty-five-minute film on waterbirds?

We weren’t stupid; we knew something was up. But we were trapped, forced to learn about cormorants, penguins, petrels, puffins, ibises and heron—all of us dead curious, of course, about what was going on with the girls. We even missed them a little.

Grant Dorset, who was two years older than the rest of us, thought he knew what was happening, so naturally Carl Spock claimed he knew too, but I didn’t trust either of them because they once put out a cigarette in my ear.

It was hard to pay attention to the birds, being so curious and all, but the colors were very bright and the sound was turned way up, so I actually started to get interested, especially in the flamingos—then suddenly the reel ended and everybody was knocking over chairs to get out to the blacktop, where all the girls were milling around, smiling strangely.

“You don’t think they saw a film on landbirds?” asked Dieter, the butterball with the bristly hair we gave knuckle burns to.

“Jesus, Dieter! Act your age, not your IQ,” said Noel, as he ran over to quiz the girls. Like us, he figured as soon as we got a hold of the Blabbermouth, Nancy Strange, we’d get to the bottom of the mystery, but even she was very coy.

It felt like something mysterious had happened. The girls were acting like they’d been let in on a big secret, as if they’d somehow gotten older than us in only an hour.

Then Noel came running back with his report. “They saw a movie too,” he said. “It was about a red dress.”

“A red dress?” we all said.

“Yeah, this little girl grows up into a real girl and her mother buys her a red dress. The rest was all about washing up. You know, about keeping clean and stuff.”

“Jesus! Who’d want a red dress?” said Paul Marhenky.

“What’s the matter, Stinky, do you wanna blue one?” said Noel as he ran off to climb the backstop, thinking the puzzle solved.

I wasn’t satisfied, though, so after social studies I cornered Lonnie Child, who kind of liked me, and she told me the movie was about bleeding and how babies are made. She told me that girls have eggs inside them, but not like the kind of eggs you buy at Safeway. Then she told me that boys have this kind of milk inside them—full of little swimming things with tails like tadpoles. It was enough to make you sick.

She said girls get eggs and bleed. Boys get directions, then the

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