Holden Lee / Creature Club / Page 1

Holden Lee / Creature Club / Page 1

I don’t know whether it was the fuzzy black antennys ending in pom-pom balls or the sniffly pink snout or the round glimmery eyes or the two flubby flipper-wings or the simple luxury of round white balloon-like furriness, but once I laid eyes on her I had to have her. In goes the one-dollar bill; the slightest nudge of my hand sends the gripper off, before it jerks to a stop right above the creature. I press the red button and the hook descends, clutching her cotton skull, bouncing her two antennys together as she rises slowly and royally above the mass of face-down rabbits with oversize ears, scorpions with shells of yucky speckled gray-green plastic, fairies with too-orange skin and tight stiff wings. The flashing light bulbs reflect from her eyes, and as she draws to eye level she seems to be looking directly at me and saying, “I knew that I was destined for higher things.”

The claw jerks and she drops back onto the pile, bouncing off a whale with a blood-red mouth and hairy eyebrows. Her eyes turn helplessly towards the ceiling and their luster fades as the light bulb dims.

$$$ INSERT BILL $$$ the screen reads.

“Come on,” my sister Alice says, pulling at my sleeve impatiently, “Stop playing those silly games. The bus is leaving in five minutes.”

“But she wants me!” I cry, “Can’t you see it in her eyes?”

“OK, go waste your money,” she says, “These things are programmed to never work.”

In goes another bill. She rises, her eyes saying, Thanks so much, I promise I won’t fail you this time. The same jitter, and she falls.

“OK, go time.”

“No,” I scream at my sister, but she wraps her long piano fingers around my wrist and drags me along. I push my foot in the ground, but cannot stop her. As we pass by the prize counter, I lunge for it and grip the other side with both hands.

Alice sighs and starts pulling at my feet. The manager comes and tries to pry my geckoey hands off.

“Sir,” I stutter, “sir, could you help me get that balloon-seal?”

I turn my head towards the machine. The light is off but the sun reflects off a window on the opposite side of the path and tints her fur a fiery red.

“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to try to get it yourself.”

The manager pries my left hand off. I thrust it into my pocket and yank out a twenty-dollar bill. Coins rattle to the floor. I toss the bill onto the table just as my other hand comes loose.

“Please, get her for me.”

“What is wrong with you, that’s not worth twenty dollars.”

But the manager comes out of his flappy door and gently separates her hand from mine. He guides me to the machine, then takes the key from the cord around his neck and inserts it into the hole. I look, wide-eyed, as the whole glass front pops open. He leans in and gingerly lifts the seal up with both hands, delivering her into my arms.

“Dad will be mad,” Sister says as we walk outside.

“Dad’ll be mad, dad’ll be mad,” I echo as I listen to a roller coaster rattle around a loop, tired of a day of carrying screaming kids, as I squeeze the seal’s furry belly and bump her nose with mine. She smells slightly musty, but there’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a good scrub with Baby Wipes.

We pass by a worker shutting down his cotton candy machine. There is a single cloud of it left. He starts to empty the container.

I fumble in my pocket and the remaining change drops onto the counter.

“I want it,” I say.

“That’s not enough,” Sister says.

The guy smiles at me. “It’s okay,” he says, and gives me that pink fluffiness on a stick. I laugh in delight as it tickles my nose. I buffet it playfully on the seal’s face, and two balls of pink wrap themselves around her antennys. Don’t I look cute with pink antennys, her eyes ask me.

“Awww, of course you do,” I say, as the dream fades to black.

I reach for my pencil and press my palm into the paper covering the wall, on the spot right besides the pillow, right above Loora. I close my eyes, bring Ballooseal up in my mind, and start to draw her. When the last toe-nub is in place, I untape the paper and pull it down, then retape it, so the paper besides my pillow is blank again.

I sink back into my bed’s pillowy embrace. When I wake up in the morning, Ballooseal will be there, cheerfully gazing at me, eyes shining with light of a different-dimensional yesterday.

On my first day of college, we arrive on campus late. My sister stands on the sidewalk with her floofy golden hair, fingers tapping at her hips as she waits.

Mom rolls down her window.

“Which way’s the dorm?” she shouts. My sister gestures towards a row of squat gray stone buildings, whose square windows form rows of disapproving eyes. Loud unfamiliar music drowns out her voice.

I hug my bulging backpack tighter to my chest. I imagine I’m a huge beast and this is my stomach, one of those trampoline stomachs that can deflect everything coming my way. I unzip the back pocket, and find comfort in Loora’s oval eyes glancing back up at me. I squeeze her pink ears.

The door unlocks, and Alice is holding my hand, pushing my pack away.

“Mom and Dad will put all the luggage in your dorm,” she says, “But you don’t want to miss the activities fair going on right now.”

She wrenches at the backpack but I keep holding the straps tightly.

“NO,” I say.

After a while she gives up. “Okay, fine, come along,” she says and I climb out.

She leaves me by the door of the gymnasium. “Stay here.” She heads for the restroom.

I peer around the doors. Hundreds of backboards sit upon rows and rows of tables. My mind flits back to the horrors of high school science fair, but just then several students yelp as two model racing cars dart between their legs, and two tall redheaded students run through the crowd holding their remotes, their shirts screaming “Electronik Society” in neon green. The cars heads right for the entrance and I dash in, just avoiding them. They loop back towards me but I am lost in the crowd already.

A disco ball dangles precariously from a backboard, sending purple, blue, and yellow in quick succession across a row of pizza boxes. A table suddenly sags to half its height as a muscley man with a microphone dangling from his arm hoists two speakers onto it. A ping-pong ball mysteriously drops out of the air and skitters across the floor.

I look in wonderment. Smiling people thrust rainbow flyers in my hand and I return their smiles. They thrust pens in my hand and point to lists, which I sign. At the chess club, several games are in progress, the table is filled, but the pudgy guy holds a board above the others’ heads like a platter of fancy food and beckons me over.

I tilt my head in thanks but I bound faster through the crowd. Amidst the spongy, trancy music-filled air, the colors seem to shift and in my mind’s eye, the hunched-up chess players moving their pawns plonk plonk across the boards morph into bright-eyed teens wearing plushie hats, sliding their Pokémon cards fwopfwop across the table. My heart speeds up and I can almost sense their aura somewhere in this vast room. As I hurry, posters for the cave-exploring, biology-engineering, acrobatics clubs rush past me. A bowl of ice cream, a cookie are shoved into my hands. A runaway soccer ball almost trips me. I slow down at the next-to-last row, panting, just beginning to worry that my club doesn’t exist, when I see a stuffed Pikachu on a table. I leap over, and grab its two pointy ears.

They don’t squeeze. They feel rough and unshaven. The tips contain sew marks.

“Hi, Welcome to the Anime Club!!” the girl behind the counter squeaks. A tuft of red hair bobs up and down between her eyes. Her lips are tiny and cherry red. “I see you like Pokémon!” She presses a button on Pikachu and his tail zags up and down like a robot. His cheeks light up. “Piiiikkkkkkkaaa…” he starts and fades as if out of batteries.

I release him, and realize he’s the only familiar face in a sea of exotic-looking dolls. The ugly frame of an orange spiky-haired action figure falls across his back. I look back and notice a crowd around, all standing there watching a large flat-screen TV on the far side of the table. Some dark-skinned man is holding a rod and laughing like a maniac.

“If you want to sign up get in line,” the red-tufted cherry-lipped girl says.

I dash away, down to the last row of tables. My hands are empty. I wonder briefly what happened to my bowl of ice cream.

I hold out hope until I reach the last table, where an old-looking guy wearing large frame glasses and a suit has his arms folded across an Encyclopedia of the World. Across from him is an unoccupied desk. I sit down, slide my backpack to the front until I’m hugging it, looking across at THE HISTORIANS in Gothic letters.

It is quiet here. I can’t get Robot Pikachu and his cherry-lipped trainer out of my head. I glance at the historian and he stares back passively. I sigh and start to unzip my bag as I whisper the newest Pokémon theme song.

“It’s always hard when the journey begins…”

Out comes Loora and her riot of rainbow legs. I swing them around like she’s a jellyfish before plopping her down on the right. Out comes my own version of Pikachu. I somersault his seamless body and hear the beans slippery-sliding under my fingers. He sits next to Loora. I glance at the historian again, see his eyes magnified by his glasses. You’re making my sit here worthwhile, he seems to be saying. I wonder what you’ll pull out next.

“TA-DA,” I shout, interrupting my rendition of the Pokémon theme song to bring out a Mareep, with wool made of that rubby-fluffy cotton that makes your hands tingle with numbness. One by one my creatures assemble themselves in an outward-facing half-circle. Out comes a bag of filling, a spool of thread, scrap pieces of felt. From the very bottom I take out my deck of Pokémon cards. I slowly flip over the top card, and my eyes tear up as loyal battle-worn Bulbasaur looks back at me, compelling me to remember how it all began, ten years ago.

It has only been a few days since Pokémon hit the stores. During recess, a fifth grader in sunglasses and a long gray coat sneaks off to the mall across the street and comes back with his pockets full of shiny foil packages. The rowdy second-graders squeeze under the peach-colored slide and shake their fistful of quarters in the air, trying to shout above each other to get the first pick. A rip and the shiny foil drifts towards the ground like a feather; by the time it falls halfway someone is already bouncing up and down on the woodchips waving some card so fast above his head that all I could see is a stream of sparkles, and the next piece of foil is on its way down.

The whistle sounds but I stay behind to put the pretty plastic wrappers in my pockets. And there is Bulbasaur, abandoned and unwanted, his slightly bent card wedged by one of the metal poles of the playground.

One afternoon several months later, I’m laying out my cards on the table again as I think about how I’m going to beat Bruno next time. I try to smooth over the gash in Bulbasaur’s eye where his fingernails dug in a little too hard, when he had dumped twenty damage counters on Bulbasaur as he jumped up and down and screamed “Charizard! Fire spin!”

“Next time,” I tell Bulbasaur, as I meet his soulful gaze and kiss him on the bulb. When I look up, Alice has pulled up a chair to my desk.

“Alan, Mom and I were talking about you,” she says, spinning a pink see-through Hello Kitty pencil. “You know why you’re not doing well in school?”

I got a lot of 2’s on my last report card. I’m still in the grade where they give out 1’s and 2’s. My sister in fourth grade gets A’s. Next year I’ll get letter grades too. I’m scared to think what 2 equals.

“Because it’s hard,” I say.

“Because you’re OCD,” she says.

“Huh?”

She stops spinning her pencil. “Ob-sess-ive com-pool-sive dis-or-der,” she says slowly.

“What’s that mean?” I ask Bulbasaur.

She sweeps up the cards and stacks them neatly. Bulbasaur is plucked out of my hand and placed on top.

“It’s a mental disorder,” she explains, “It means that thoughts of Pokémon cards are eating up your brain and you can’t think straight. So we’ve decided to take away your cards until you do better in school. Capiche?” I reach for the cards, but she has already taken out a tin from her sweater pocket and locked them inside.

“Please don’t,” I sob but she holds the tin high, away from me. “Why?”

“I don’t want to do this!” she says. She seems unhappy. “I’m doing this so you’ll get better! Once you do we’ll give them back to you. Okay?”

I look at her through watery eyes. She lets her hands down when she sees I’m no longer grabbing for the box.

“Promise me you’ll take care of them?” I say.

“I will.”

“They need someone to say ‘I love you’ every night. Will you do that?”

She sighs. “Don’t worry, I will.”

When I close my eyes I find myself falling through a breezy softness. I feel the cotton snowballs tumbling down around me, tickling my face and arms with their bajillions of tiny hairs. I slowly climb out of the pile and see Alice standing in front of me, looking uncertain.

“What is this place?”

“It’s the Pom Pom Palace!” I say, spreading my arms, following her eyes, taking in the tens, hundreds, millions of piles of giant cotton balls, stretching in every direction, all exactly the same shape and height.

“This is pure OCD-ness,” she says, so low I can barely hear. Then louder, “What is the meaning of this OCD-ness!”

“I see what you mean. We need some color.”

I look towards the ceiling. It’s bright white and borderless, so that you might be fooled into thinking it’s the sky, but then you see the hook and pail that seem to be floating in midair, and the faint shadows of the groove that it’s sliding along. It moves with a whirring sound and stops above the mound besides Alice. The hook jerks and the pail upturns, spilling orange paint on the pile. Alice yelps and moves aside. The lower half of her jeans is now orange.

“Color!” I shout. “Color!”

Swish. Flaps in the ceiling swing open and release more pails. Waterfalls of rainbow paint flow down the cotton hills. Alice takes an armful of still-white cotton balls and rubs them furiously against her pants, smooshing the balls into pancakes.

As the last bits of paint trickle along the concrete floor, I raise my hands like a conductor and the balls begin floating in the air.

“Eyes!” I say, and a fine drizzle of plastic eyes rains down. “Legs!” Hundred foot long pipe cleaners snake along the ceiling. Clip clip clip. They fall in quarter-inch long bits, stick to the upturned bodies and start squirming with a life of their own. “Wings! Tails!”

“Alan! You’re floating!” Alice calls.

I look down. My feet are no longer on my ground. The pom-poms are swirling thick around me like a tornado, their shimmery eyes all focused on their creator. “Woahahoah!” They shake me around so I look like I’m doing an absurd dance. I laugh in delight.

Alice screams. The squooshed pom-poms, dabbed unevenly with paint, are inflating themselves angrily, pooff pooffFF into a cloud of angry orange polka-dotted mosquitoes. They each yank one of their legs off and attach it to their faces, then launch themselves on her skin.

“Alan, save me!”

“She’s a friend, she’s a friend!” I yell. I tilt my head and the multicolored tornado brings me above her. I reach out my hand to grab hers and we are off, flying through the pom-pom blizzard.

Mom leaves Alice and me in front of KB Toys, with her ten dollars and my five, before leaving to get groceries.

“Mom says no cards for you,” Alice says when we are alone. “Everything else is fine.”

I look past her. A chubby pink pig in a rink is going in circles. Oink oink oink oink

“Perhaps a model car? They’re on sale this week.” Oink oink oink oink. “How about a board game? We can play together. I’ll pool my money with yours.” Oink oink oink oink. “Do you want the pig?”