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TOPICS My blog e-mail me | Theater-acting-teaching kids Working with schoolchildren Tales told in school Sea Monkeys Rule...Sort of |
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A story created by
Annette’s class at P.S. 3 Spring, 1998 Recorded by their Book Pals reader Richard Yanowitz The authors:
Thousands of years ago, a
continent named Atlantis flourished in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, midway
between Africa and the American continents.
The people on Atlantis were happy and peaceful. They had few needs, and so they had little
work other than to hunt or grow and harvest enough food for their
population. Atlantan artists painted
and sculpted the most beautiful works, and Atlantan musicians composed songs to
which the people loved to listen and dance.
The Atlantans knew that
people lived on the rest of the world, but they sought to kept their own
existence as secret as possible so that no outsiders could spoil their
wonderful life. One day, however, an
underwater earthquake erupted of such force that it slowly sank the
island. Just enough time existed for
the wisest Atlantans to design and construct a huge dome beneath which the
people could survive on their submerged continent. Believing that the earthquake was no accident but had been
triggered by hostile people from other nations of the world, the citizens of
one of the Atlantan countries, named Flussia, passed down to their children and
their children’s children and their children’s children’s children, and so on for
thousands of years, the tale that humans in the rest of the world were evil and
had sought to destroy Atlantis. Despite (or perhaps because
of) isolation from the rest of the world, life in Atlantis went on happily for
many thousands of years, and the rest of the world, which anyway had barely
heard of Atlantis, forgot that it had ever existed, except in myths to which
almost no one paid attention. But
thirty years before the time when this tale takes place, Atlantan scientists
began to notice something strange was happening to their continent. Although oxygen was sealed into the
continent by the giant dome, the land was still affected by absorption of
substances in the ocean surrounding it.
And whatever these substances were—in fact, they were the result of
pollution from the rest of the world, especially in the Northern
hemisphere—they were suddenly starting to make life deteriorate. Plants began to become smaller and less
common. Animal life began to alter. But the most startling and
disturbing change of all came with almost no warning. One day, a Flussian mother found her baby starting to
look…strange. She and the father
hurried to the family doctor, but even in the time it took to get there, the
baby had totally changed, from a human into a…sea monkey. While trying to calm and
reassure the parents, the doctor sent out emergency messages to the Flussian
and Atlanta scientific community. At
first no one believed her, but before long, more and more reports of changes
into sea monkeys were heard, and panic began to sweep the population of the
continent. Scientists worked feverishly
to analyze what was happening, but they weren’t fast enough: before they knew
it, the scientists themselves, along with everyone around them, had turned into
sea monkeys. But very special sea
monkeys. In all ways except outer
appearance, they retained the characteristics of the human beings they had
previously been. They could talk,
think, work, laugh, cry, dance. Except
that everyone looked different, life went on as before. Businesses continued to function, child sea
monkeys attended school, .Atlantans continued to prepare and enjoy the same
food as before. Atlantans even began to
think that looking like sea monkeys was better than looking human. But there was one glaring
difference from when they were human: for some unknown reason, the
transformation into sea monkeys had carried with it a powerful taste for
cockroaches, which became more of a treat in Atlantis than sugar was in the
rest of the world. And while cockroaches
flourished throughout the rest of Atlantis, they were unable to survive in the
hyper-clean environment of Flussia.
Atlantans elsewhere took advantage of this fact and exported tiny
packages of grade-A cockroach parts to
Flussia at prices that only the richest Flussians could afford, so that all
Flussians (except the few pathetic souls born allergic to cockroaches) prized
these insects as the rarest and most expensive of treats. Flussian children would go to sleep dreaming
of a paradise where cockroaches were so abundant that they occupied everyone’s
home and happily jumped into salivating mouths. Now while the rest of
Atlantis seemed to resign itself—even to welcome—its fate of perpetually being
sea monkeys, the people of Flussia, perhaps in reaction to the scarcity of
cockroaches, were outraged. “Remember
the earthquake that the rest of the world created to sink our continent?” they
said to each other. “Human beings must
have thought they had gotten rid of us, and then discovered we still existed!
So their descendants injected into the ocean some kind of poison to destroy us
for good.” Desiring revenge, the
Flussian government decided to make war on the rest of the world. Flussian technicians devised equipment to
eavesdrop on other countries’ radio and telephone communications so they could
study what that world was like.
Deciding that the United States was the most dangerous country, Flussian
leaders decided to send a spy there. A
volunteer named Chris, who had grown up with his mother after his father had
left Atlantis before the sea-monkey change to earn a living elsewhere in the
world, stepped forward. During Chris’
training to be a spy, Flussian scientists devised brilliant disguises that
would enable Chris to look totally human, and to change his appearance if
anyone became suspicious. And so Chris went to live in
New York City, on the ground floor of a brownstone, in a small apartment on a
street in Greenwich Village. A few blocks away lived a boy
named Chuckie. On his way to and from school,
Chuckie would pass the street on which Chris lived, though Chuckie had never
seen Chris. One day, however, as he
passed this street, Chuckie noticed a strange and unpleasant odor. Curious, he turned into the street, sniffing
the air, following the growing strength of the scent. Halfway down the block, the smell became most powerful. Climbing over a low railing in front of the
building from which the smell seemed to be emanating, Chuckie peered in a
street-level window. At first he could make out nothing. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the
darkness behind the window, he saw someone moving at the far end of the
room. The person, who seemed very
small—a child, Chuckie decided—appeared to be cupping something in its hand and
nibbling at the contents as one would nibble at small M&M’s, or
popcorn. Chuckie squinted, and now he
saw that the person was no person at all but some kind of…creature. At that moment, the creature’s hand twitched
as if trying to grasp something alive, and indeed an object seemed to jump from
the creature’s hand, or claw, or paw (Chuckie could not tell which), and
scrabble across the floor in Chuckie’s direction. Now Chuckie could see what it
was: a cockroach. His mouth and face
scrunched up in disgust, even as the creature scurried after the insect and,
with a lightning motion swept of its…hand…flipped the cockroach into the air in
a wide arc. Expertly, the creature
caught the cockroach in its teeth, bit down several times so that Chuckie
imagined he could hear a crunching chorus, and finally, smiling, swallowed the
snack. Now the creature, head bent
to the floor as if searching for something, took another step toward the
window, so that Chuckie could at last see it clearly. It looked exactly like a…sea monkey! Frozen by what he had been watching, Chuckie gasped, and the
creature’s head jerked up toward the window.
The head moved from side to side to make out what had made the
noise. Spotting a human peering in at
him, the creature cried out, opened its jaws to expose long and pointed teeth,
and leaped toward the window to destroy the only human being who had ever seen
him as he really was. Still frozen with fear,
Chuckie’s watched helplessly as Chris the spy—for, of course, that is who the
creature was—struggled with the window, which was stuck shut from never having
been opened since the last time it was painted just before Chris had moved into
the apartment. Chris was also having
trouble because of some bulky object at his feet that interfered with his
leverage as he tugged at the window.
Chuckie’s eyes focused on the object—the decaying body of a man who
appeared to be middle-aged, though it was impossible to be certain because so
little of the man’s rotting flesh remained on his skull. This, Chuckie realized with another
gasp, must be the source of that awful smell.
And indeed, the body was that of Chris’s landlord. Chris had chosen this particular apartment
for its unusually large population of cockroaches. For several months, he had gloried in the ability to feast on all
the cockroaches he could swallow whenever he wanted. Like a human in advanced stages of alcoholism, Chris paid
attention to little else than satisfying his appetite for cockroaches, and he
had completely neglected his spying mission. A few weeks earlier, Chris
the Spy had received the greatest shock of his life, when the landlord had
notified all tenants that the building would be fumigated to destroy—murder, in
Chris’ mind—the cockroaches about which other tenants had long complained. Desperate to avoid losing his happiness,
Chris had murdered the landlord and left the body to decay beneath the window. At last, Chris realized he
would never pry the window open.
Changing shape before Chuckie’s very eyes, Chris turned himself into a
human so that he could run out into the street and drag Chuckie into his
apartment to join the landlord’s body.
Somehow, this new shock of seeing not just a cockroach-munching sea
monkey but a sea monkey who turned into a human (or was it a human who had
earlier turned into a sea monkey? Chuckie found himself wondering), awoke
Chuckie from his trance, and he found himself able to move again. Terrified, he fled down the
block in the direction he had come. As
he reached the corner, Chris emerged from his building and began running after
Chuckie, rapidly gaining ground on him.
But just as it appeared that Chris would catch up, they arrived at a
park where Chuckie’s friends were playing tag.
Chris pulled up short, for he could not afford witnesses to the
abduction. Looking back over his
shoulder, Chuckie dashed among his friends.
He pointed at Chris and tried to explain, but the friends laughed,
certain that Chuckie was joking with them—for would you, dear reader, believe
someone who pointed to a normal-looking human being and insisted that the
person was really a murdering, cockroach-eating sea monkey? I don’t think so. Chris smiled at the group and
pretended to walk on. But he actually
hid himself down the block, and when Chuckie walked off with a few friends,
Chris secretly followed them. He knew
it was too great a risk to try to grab Chuckie now, but at least he was able in
this way to find where Chuckie lived. At home, Chuckie explained to
his parents, who drove a Duffy truck and collected garbage in the neighborhood,
what had happened. They weren’t sure
whether to believe him, but they agreed at least to stop picking up the garbage
at Chuckie’s building. Terrified that
Chris would, in fact, find him, Chuckie began never going out by himself but
always with his parents or friends.
Chris indeed followed Chuckie, hoping to find a moment when his prey
would be alone. So that Chuckie would
not forget his life would soon be over, Chris would hide behind displays and
stacked goods in supermarkets and leap out at Chuckie when no one else was
looking. But always fearful that others
might turn around and see what he was doing, Chris never felt confident enough
to grab Chuckie and run off with him. But the pursuit was
destroying Chris’s life. He was
constantly worried that someone would believe Chuckie, which would mean the end
of Chris’ spying mission—and even more importantly, of his supply of
cockroaches. As garbage piled up in
front of his building, threatening to draw special attention, Chris stole a
Duffy truck and began to follow Chuckie’s parents. And one day, when he found them completely alone, Chris ran over
them with his Duffy truck. Poor Chuckie was now an
orphan, still pursued by Chris. But
fortunately, Chuckie was adopted by his Aunt Pauline and Uncle Phyllis, who had
once lived in the midwest and had since moved to France, where they lived as
illegal immigrants in a large two-story house on the main street of a small
town. Phyllis got his name because he
was born with hair down to his waist so that his parents, prisoners of
traditional views of boys and girls, at first thought he was a girl. Phyllis had a brother named Iris, whom he
loved dearly, and who lived with Phyllis and his wife. Phyllis and Pauline had a
son, Chuckie’s cousin, Melvin, a year younger than Chuckie. The cousins got along very well, so that
while Chuckie never forgot his parents or his sadness and anger at their
deaths, he was able to enjoy his new life. The house in which the family
lived—Pauline, Phyllis, Melvin, Iris and now Chuckie—had cost just one
franc. Unknown to the family, which had
merely considered itself lucky to pay such a ridiculously low price, the house
had two secrets kept from them by the realtor, Zane, who had sold them the
house. First, the plumbing in this
town had been designed and built by a con-artist who pretended to be an
engineer but who knew nothing about plumbing, and he had somehow managed to
hook up all pipes so that they ended up in the house where Chuckie and his new
family lived. On some days, this fact
made the house very disgusting indeed. Secondly, a reclusive
scientist, Dr. Olivia, lived in a fall-out shelter concealed in the basement of
the house. This troubled woman had been
raised by cruel parents who would not even let her own dolls. While still very young, she had found a
leather strap which she smuggled to her room and treated as a doll. She loved this strap-doll, and played with
it all the time. But one day her
parents discovered what she was doing, beat her with the strap, and buried it
in a field outside the town so she would never find it. From that day forward, Olivia (now Doctor
Olivia, or “Doctor O” as she liked to think of herself), resolved to get
revenge on all who committed strap abuse.
Moreover, Doctor O became
especially annoyed with the new family in what she thought of as “her”
house. The family had brought baseball
equipment with them from America, and the two cousins would throw and bat the
ball to each other. One day soon after
Chuckie arrived, the boys broke an upstairs window while batting a baseball to
each other; the crash was so loud that it woke Doctor O from a nap. (Not wanting to have Phyllis and Pauline
angry at them, the boys took some styrofoam left over from unpacking Chuckie’s
belongings that had been shipped from America, and they shaped the styrofoam to
fill the hole in the broken window.)
Even worse, in a corner of the attic Melvin had found a chair on wheels,
which he brought downstairs to play in.
His favorite game became having a member of the family roll him around
in the chair. The noise from the
rolling wheels echoed into the basement and reverberated inside Doctor O’s
hidden fallout shelter, giving her headaches and keeping her awake. Since she felt unable to leave her shelter,
out of fear that a nuclear war might break out while she was exposed, Doctor O
had to suffer in silence. And then something very
strange indeed happened. Doctor O
thought she had sealed her shelter against the outside world, but she had been
planning only for people. And one day,
not a person but a snake appeared inside her private home. Somehow, it had managed to slither through a
crack in the doorway. “What are you doing here?”
demanded Doctor O upon catching sight of the snake. “I’m sssssorry to
dissssssturb you,” came the reply, “but I have an important requessssst to
make.” “Go back where you came
from,” demanded Doctor O. “I don’t talk
to snakes. Or to anyone, in fact.” “But I badly need your
ssssservices. And I am willing to trade
for them.” “Sssss…I mean, “services”? What kind of services?” “I want you to create a
sssssstrawberry. A ssssspecial
ssssstrawberry.” “Special? What are you talking about? Who are you, anyway?” “My name is Keebo. And I run a bootleg videotape operation from
a tree in front of the porch of thisssss housssssse.” “Well, I certainly don’t see
what good I can do you. Or why you
would need some kind of strawberry. Now
get out of here.” “I am afraid that the family
that moved in here will disssssscover my bootleg operation, and I want to get
rid of them.” “I don’t care what… What did you say?” “I am afraid…” “No. I heard you. Maybe we do have a common interest. Tell me more about this strawberry.” “I want to be able to inject
my poison into the ssssstrawberry so that sssssomeone will eat it and die.” Now as it happened, Doctor O,
in her hatred of strap abuse and of most human beings, had made herself a
specialist in poison design. In fact,
Keebo knew all about this when he decided to go to her, and he was pretending
ignorance. “If you made thisssss
sssssstrawberry for me, I would gladly do sssssomething nice for you, too.” “You know what I would like,”
said Doctor O after reflecting several moments, “is to stop that horrible
racket that rolls around above me. I
don’t know what it’s from, but it would make me crazy if I weren’t so sane.” “Why, I know all about
that. The ssssound comes from a chair
that one of the boys, Melvin, getsssss pushed around on. It disssssturbs me, too, when I’m trying to
ssssssell my bootleg videotapesssss.
I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’m too ssssssmall to ssssssteal the whole
chair, but I can take the wheels and bring them to you.” “Wonderful!” exclaimed Doctor
O, and she shook Keebo’s tail to signify agreement. That night, while the family
was asleep, Keebo sneaked into the house and, with considerable trouble,
finally managed to detach each wheel from the chair. When he brought them to Doctor O, she had his strawberry
ready. When they had exchanged goods,
Doctor O said, “Just one other thing.”
And she picked up a container of dental floss. “I wonder if you would mind depositing this in the bathroom of
the family who lives in this house.
It’s a special…mixture…that I’ve prepared and that will, I believe,
serve both you and me.” “Gladly,” said Keebo, taking
the container in his mouth and slithering off to place it in the medicine
cabinet of the upstairs bathroom. To
reward Doctor O for this extra effort, he brought her a fresh bootleg copy of Titanic, which one of his employees had
secretly filmed at the local cinema the night before with a video camera. That night, Doctor O watched
the video Keebo had brought her.
Although the quality was very poor, she had become quite interested in
the story when the actors on the screen were suddenly blocked out by a strange
scene that must have occurred right in front of the bootlegger’s video
camera. A man with a moustache was
standing over a woman sitting one row closer to the screen. In the man’s hand was a strap—no, not just any strap, but the very strap Doctor O
had played with so many many years ago.
And the bootleg tape had picked up the following conversation: Man with strap: “Give me a dollar or I’ll make
you smell this strap. It is an old, old
and very sweaty strap, so you would be well advised to give me the dollar.” Woman in seat: “Shhhh. I’m trying to watch
the movie.” Man with strap: “The sooner you give me a dollar, the sooner you'll be able to watch
the movie.” Woman in seat: “I don’t have a dollar. This
is France. Now go away.” Man with strap: “All right, then. You asked for
it.” And the man brought the strap
under the seated person’s nose. She
started gagging and almost fainting, and the man with the strap then moved on
down the row, out of sight. Doctor O
could again hear the dialogue from the film—but she could also hear the man’s
distant voice threatening yet another filmgoer. Between seeing her lost doll
again and seeing it used for strap abuse again, you can imagine how shocked
Doctor O was. She didn’t know what to
do, but she was determined to get her strap back and punish the strap abuser,
even if it meant she would have to leave her secret hideout. The man with the strap was,
in fact, named was Scottie, and although Doctor O, of course, didn’t know it,
he was a friend of the family who lived in the house. He had once been principal of P.S. 41 nearby. At that time, he had taken a class on an
archaeological dig in a field outside the town, and during the dig had come
upon this very strap, buried there years before by Doctor O’s parents. Grasping the strap before realizing what it
was, Scottie immediately felt something peculiar in his blood, for he had that
rarest of genetic diseases, addiction to strap abuse if his skin ever touched a
leather strap. He had been warned of
this at an early age, and up until now he had always managed to avoid touching
leather straps. But now it was too late, and
Scottie’s life went into decline. He
began demanding a dollar from students and teachers in his school, and from
anyone else he came upon; and if they refused to pay, he subjected them to the
odor of the sweaty strap. Soon, he was
fired from the school, but that didn’t stop him. He collected many a dollar this way—and forced anyone who refused
to give him the dollar to smell the increasingly smelly strap. As it happened, the next day
after Keebo received the poisoned strawberry and Doctor O viewed the videotape
was Bastille Day, the French national holiday to celebrate the France
revolution. This year, Bastille Day was
especially important, because the American family had been influencing the
local people to change their national holiday.
Feeling strange about living in a new country, the family had taped an
American flag above the porch of the house.
When neighbors asked about the flag, the Americans described the signing
of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and explained that this was
the American national holiday. As word
of this holiday spread, more and more local French people became interested in
it, and they began to celebrate it instead of Bastille Day, which occurred 10
days and 13 years after the signing of the American Declaration of
Independence. Of course, this shift of
attention from the national holiday of France to the national holiday of the
United States caused much resentment from French people who continued to
celebrate Bastille Day, and that is why this year’s Bastille Day seemed
especially important. Melvin had bought himself a
magnifying glass, and this morning in the bright sunlight he was on the lawn,
trying to focus the sun’s rays to burn insects on the lawn. Keebo, who felt that insects were his
friends, was furious when he saw what was happening, and he sneaked up to bite
Melvin and poison him. Keebo’s mouth
opened wider and wider, but just as he leaped forward to bite Melvin’s leg,
Melvin happened to swing the magnifying glass into Keebo’s path, and the fangs
smashed against the lens. In agony,
Keebo limped back to his tree without ever being seen by Melvin. Furious, Keebo decided to put
his strawberry plan into immediate action.
Carefully, to avoid pain from the swollen mouth around his bent fangs,
Keebo bit into the strawberry and deposited all his poison there. Then he hung the strawberry on the tree,
where it looked especially delicious. He
could hardly wait for one of the humans to spot the fruit, eat it, and fall
dead instantly. He watched eagerly as all the
family except Iris gathered on the lawn to watch the Bastille Day parade, just
starting to pass the house. The local
school janitor, Dave, who was missing a hand because of a terrible accident
when he was working at P.S. 41, was standing with them, as was Scottie, who
suddenly felt the need to take a whiz and, rather than traipse upstairs to the
bathroom, went to the bushes nearby. Hiding
in the bushes with a small pistol, Chris the Spy was hoping for an opportune
moment to shoot Chuckie. Iris, who had purchased
firecrackers for the day, was late because he had gone to the upstairs bathroom
to wash his hands. Having rested the
firecrackers on the window sill of the bathroom, in the midst of washing his
eyes wandered toward the toilet. What
he saw nearly made him faint. It seems that some months
back, when Scottie was still principal of P.S. 41, he had sent the custodian,
Dave, to clear a clogged toilet in the boys’ bathroom. Dave put on a yellow rubber glove, and as he
was clearing the clog, Scottie, angry at Dave for never giving him a dollar,
sneaked up and, unseen, flushed the toilet.
Poor Dave’s gloved hand was torn from his arm and sucked into the sewer
system. Now, months later, rotten and
bloated, it had ended up in the toilet next to the sink where Iris was washing
his hands. The sight of the hand made
Iris so disgusted that even his mouth felt filthy, and he opened the medicine
cabinet to search for something that would help him feel clean. His gaze falling upon a container of dental
floss, he tore off a long strand and began to floss his teeth—only to keel over
moments later as Doctor O’s poison quickly took effect. Falling against the window sill, Iris
dislodged the firecrackers he had balanced there. Down they tumbled, bouncing
on the porch roof below once, twice, three times, before falling into Keebo’s
tree, where they began to explode. Not
knowing what was happening and terrified that his bootleg video store was about
to explode, Keebo dashed out onto the lawn amdist the chaos there. The humans were all jumping around,
startled—except for Chuckie, who seemed to have collapsed to the ground in his
terror. In her fallout shelter,
Doctor O heard the explosions and thought nuclear war had begun. Revving up an untested new super-weapon she
had been working on to punish the strap abuser she had seen in the bootleg
video, she pushed it from her shelter and then out of the basement on the
wheels that Keebo had stolen. Totally
disoriented, she took aim at nowhere in particular and fired, but nothing
happened, and when she examined the gunpowder, she realized that she had
confused the powder with grains of wheat she had stolen from the field of a
neighboring farmer—a man who, wearing a straw hat with a colored band, happened
to be standing nearby in the growing crowd that was watching the Bastille Day
parade. As Doctor O wheeled out her
useless weapon, Scottie saw someone with a pistol pop up from the bushes right
alongside him and pull the trigger. At
the movement, Scottie had raised his arm by reflex, and so the bullet hit the
strap, shattering it to tiny pieces and ricocheting directly at Chuckie’s
heart. It was the bullet, not terror at
the noise from the firecrackers, that made Chuckie collapse, dead from the
gunshot which Chris the Spy hoped would be muffled by the exploding
firecrackers. For a moment, Scottie was
paralyzed by what had just happened.
But a moment later he exclaimed, “Chris!” Chris the Spy had been
concentrating so hard on shooting Chuckie that he had not even noticed
Scottie. But at the sound of his own
name, Chris turned, and then gasped, “Father!” For indeed, Scottie was the
father who had left Flussia so long ago, before the sea monkey transformation,
to seek his fortune in France. Scottie
and Chris hugged each other—only moments later to find themselves being
handcuffed. For at the head of the
passing parade was the police honor guard.
Having witnessed what happened, they had left the parade and fanned out
over the lawn. They arrested Chris for
shooting Chuckie (though they never found out he had also killed Chuckie’s
parents). They arrested Scottie for
strap abuse (for in response to numerous complaints from people living in the
area, they had been on his trail a long time).
They arrested Keebo for his bootleg video store (and the police made
sure to watch all the movies before they turned them over to the prosecuting
attorney). They arrested Doctor O for
illegal manufacture of poison and weapons (and while they suspected she was the
cause of Iris’ death, they could never prove it). And they arrested the Americans for illegal immigration (the
family, deported back to the United States, was ever afterwards sad about
Chuckie’s death; but Melvin grew up to become a great leader who worked for
peace and to help curb further pollution affecting Atlantis—though it was too
late to save the Atlantans from being sea monkeys). As the only person who had
done nothing illegal, and because he had suffered a permanent disability while
working for the government, Dave received the house, and, after learning to use
a mechanical hand, spent the rest of his days re-organizing the local sewer
system. Having never received the
secrets of the American military, Flussia abandoned its plan to invade the rest
of the world. But during a private
session with his Flussian lawyer, who was disguised as a human being, Chris the
Spy relayed the fact of how abundant cockroaches were in Greenwich Village, and
the Flussians established a smuggling scheme that provided all the freeze-dried
cockroaches anyone could ever want.
Happily crunching cockroaches ever after, all Flussians, rich and poor
alike, were now so happy that they accepted their lot as sea monkeys and
flourished without further interference from the outside world. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||