The Creature

Nobody expected the creature to take on the appearance that it had. For one, its forehead was aligned with fourteen horn-like protrusions that moved and jittered about, especially on times of agitation. For another, its skin was undeniably purple.

“And look at its teeth,” suggested Jerry, one of its creators. “If those don’t remind you of an array of tennis rackets in the middle of a football field, you need to have your head checked up.”

“That’s right,” said Henry A—, yet another one of the creature’s makers. “And its braided, long, gelatinous hair looks as though it grew from a paper recycling plant.”

“Oh, shut up, the two of you,” ordered Maritess, another collaborator in the project, one who had authority over the previous two enough to order them around. “Don’t you see that his squiggly tendrils need a direct application of mushroom spray? And how’s about checking his nether regions for an abnormal accumulation of chickweeds while you’re at it? With all this soap, I kinda get the feeling that no one can be sure.”

The two young scientists had no choice but to do as Maritess had ordered. “Ah well,” they said, “at least we’ll be close enough to witness the palpitation of its gestationary organs—and yet still far enough not to inhale its abrasive vapors.”

“That’s right,” suddenly interrupted Dr. Pete, caretaker of the laboratory. “You know, a certain Dr. Bob once made the hypothesis that there is a far more literal interbodily relationship between that creature’s reproductive and excretory functions than the textbooks suggest. Of course, everybody in the Discipline thought it was irresponsible of him to have press released something like that, and that’s why he got demoted to being a lab assistant for the next twenty-four years of his career.”

“That’s so sad,” said the two young scientists, “considering that his hypothesis is not at all far from the truth. Thanks to the Foo-yei Series, we now have the creature’s interbodily functions reduced to a string of mathematical equations.”

“That is true,” remarked Dr. Pete. “Unfortunately, his morphological developments are still as unpredictable and as subject to checker board scrutiny as the words formed inside your stomach when you eat a bowl of alphabet soup on a rainy morning.”

“That may not be as a scientific an observation as you may think, Dr. Pete,” mused aloud Maritess. “For one, the latest tests confirm an optimistic Comparability Factor of his exoskeletal development to the sinusoidal curve of a Chinese mooncake when simulated in Hal.”

Dr. Pete raised a dubious, snobbish eyebrow at this. “Is that so?”

Maritess nodded. “Not only that. Don’t you know that the integral of the perimeter of his vertebrae, regardless of the number, from the first to the last, is equal to that of the consistency of the Pulp of Yagii¹?”

“This creature is not something to be feared so much then?” Dr. Pete asked, looking at the creature behind his plastic framed glasses now with reconsidered understanding and renewed reverence.

“Not at all, Doctor,” said Maritess, as she stood beside him. She looked at him looking at the creature, and at that moment she felt a deep longing to cry. She didn’t, though, and instead took the doctor’s hand in hers and pointed at the creature’s ears.

“Look, Dr. Pete, at that pair of ears,” she said. “If that isn’t the perfect embodiment of the Gauss-Jordan-Freudian Map, every single person in this perishing world of ours needs to have his or her head examined.”




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¹ A discovery made by one of Maritess’s preschool students, but had been bragged by and claimed as Maritess’s own for 2.52 years already, that people started attributing it to her.

© Jay Santos 2003.