The Summer of Barry

I live in a subdivision

called Dunbar Lakes.

Our streets were given nautical names,

like Regatta and Seaside,

but we are not near any major bodies of water.

There’s just a small retention pond

in the center of the subdivision,

next to the clubhouse and the tennis courts.

Last summer they discovered

a sea monster

living at the bottom

of the retention pond.

I don’t know how it got there,

or how my subdivision could sustain

an enormous beast

in this small body of water.

I came up with the name “Barry,”

for DunBAR Lakes,

and it quickly caught on,

but I never got any of the credit.

Barry was estimated to be

about thirty feet long,

and maybe a few hundred pounds.

He had an iridescent serpentine body

with grey fins,

including a large dorsal fin on his back.

He had the head of a Chinese dragon,

or so said my neighbor, Marla,

who claimed he tried to attack her

when she was walking her little white dog, Fritz,

but to be honest,

that dog is a real shit,

and I think Marla is drunk half the time.

Once the city confirmed

the existence of this creature,

our housing association

called for an immediate meeting,

which had to be held in a conference room

at the township library

because people were too afraid to gather

in the clubhouse next to the pond.

Every day a large crowd would gather

to watch the creature

as it raised his head periodically for air,

to see his dorsal fin skimming through

the surface of the water,

to observe him trying to take a bite

out of an unsuspecting Canada goose.

My neighbor, Ted Park, who is a board member,

told me that all these budding naturalists

were blocking people’s driveways with their cars,

and there were a ton of complaints,

which is why the daytime parking regulations changed

yet again.

Each morning would be small clusters of men,

the ones wearing camouflage pants

and bright orange hats,

sitting by the side of the pond with heavy fishing rods,

hot coffee in a thermos

with maybe a little booze added,

who thought they’d be able to hook the beast.

“That’s nonsense,” boomed Reggie Davison,

“you need a hand grenade to take that thing out.”

He implied he had a box of hand grenades

in his basement,

“but the goddamn governor

would never let me use them.

Don’t come crying to me

when that thing eats someone’s kid!”

Others in the neighborhood

were more conservation-minded,

like Luma Santiago,

who found the creature

“breathtaking, stunning, a miracle!”

and who stood angrily in front of the fishermen,

arms outstretched,

threatening to snap their rods.

Jim Hulce was an amateur photographer

and would regularly duck under

the yellow police tape

to try to take the closest possible photographs,

but could only produce blurry images,

like a Monet painting of the beast in the rain.

A team of marine biology experts

was assembled to document, identify,

trap, and rehome Barry,

and Animal Planet was there

to air a live television special

as the beast was caught

and carried by helicopter

to its new freshwater home.

As always,

when a television show

promises to show something extraordinary live,

it was a total disappointment.

The beast had vanished overnight,

as suddenly as it had appeared.

Nothing left in the pond

but some large carp,

turtles, herons, egrets, seagulls, muskrats,

and those damned Canada geese.

Had Barry been abducted by aliens?

Had he slipped through the same interdimensional wormhole

he had used to enter our lake?

Did he grow some legs and walk away

to another nearby suburb?

No one could explain his very existence

or his abrupt disappearance,

and all Animal Planet had to air

was interviews with baffled experts

and my stupid neighbors.