Maybe you don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster. Maybe you’ve never thought to. There’s a lot to concern yourself with in the sixth grade, a lot more than some moss-covered lake beast whose only power seems to be that she comes out blurry in every photo. She can’t save you a seat on the bus when the eighth-graders refuse to shove over and share. She can’t make you better at basketball, keep your teammates from calling you a klutz as you change in the locker room after P.E. She can’t lend you a dollar and twenty-five cents when your mom forgets to send lunch money on the first Tuesday of the month, can’t take you shopping for the right jeans, can’t tell your mother how to pick out the right jeans in the first place. But the Loch Ness Monster wishes she could. Down deep in the murky, chilly waters she drifts, munching on reedy plants and soggy bread crusts and listening, listening, listening for the sound of a basketball swishing perfectly through the hoop. She tries to use her telepathy to send your mother a message, an image of flared pant legs and strategic rips and splashes of bleach against dark wash, but all your mother hears is a faint echo like whalesong. The Loch Ness Monster yearns for more of that ancient magic to reach you. She kythes her love in giant bubbles, in ripples with her flippers; thinks of you as little guppy, as small fry, as wee one. If only she could make you know that this will pass, that the nervous minutes you spend scanning the sticky vinyl seats will fade away, a memory you won’t even bother to remember. For now, she dreams of the day you might visit her shores—the chance that, at just the right moment, she might glimpse your pale neck, your spindly shadow. Maybe you don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster, but the Loch Ness Monster believes in you.
Margaret Emma Brandl's novella Tuscaloosa (Or, In April, Harpies) was published by Bridge Eight Press in 2021. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and video essays have appeared in magazines such as Gulf Coast, Yalobusha Review, River Teeth, and Moon City Review. She teaches creative writing and other English courses at Austin College in Sherman, TX.
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