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The Bog Monster of Booker Creek
A Novel
By Wayne V. Miller © 2009
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
Dear Brett,
Just to be clear -- the bog monster was always me, never anything or anyone else. I wish I could have explained this to you in a way that made sense to you. I'm starting a record of what happened, but I won't share it with you until you're older, maybe when you're twenty-five, old enough to chuckle at your off-kilter old man but young enough to remember how we survived the frenzy together. You were tough, tougher than I could have imagined, but I wish I could have done more to protect you. Maybe you'll understand when you read this.
I am going to lay everything out from the beginning, in February 2005. You were an eighth grader at Phillips Middle School, a tall, lanky, skinny- armed boy, with pale skin and an assortment of blackheads and zits, a sometimes goofy smile that I saw you cultivate in front of the mirror -- which fit perfectly with the oversized cat-in-the-hat headwear you wore sometimes to parties -- and yet there was a penchant for the pained look of the only child. Your mother and I were worried about you because you seemed to have bottled up, withdrawn from the kids you had played with just a few years before. Nothing seemed to interest you much; you watched too much TV, played too many