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By Root 1914 0

young women killed on the site of his grave. We listened. No one tried to stop her. “I myself have been in Egypt,” she said, “and have witnessed much dust and many brutalities.” She said that an old man in Egypt who worked for a circus had personally shown her an animal in a cage, a monster, half bird and half lion. She said that this monster was called a gryphon and that she had heard about them but never seen them until she traveled to the outskirts of Cairo. She wrote the word out on the blackboard in large capital letters: “GRYPHON.” She said that Egyptian astronomers had discovered the planet Saturn but had not seen its rings. She said that the Egyptians were the first to discover that dogs, when they are ill, will not drink from rivers, but wait for rain, and hold their jaws open to catch it.

“She lies.”

We were on the school bus home. I was sitting next to Carl Whiteside, who had bad breath and a huge collection of marbles. We were arguing. Carl thought she was lying. I said she wasn’t, probably.

“I didn’t believe that stuff about the bird,” Carl said, “and what she told us about the pyramids? I didn’t believe that, either. She didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Oh yeah?” I had liked her. She was strange. I thought I could nail him. “If she was lying,” I said, “what’d she say that was a lie?”

“Six times eleven isn’t sixty-eight. It isn’t ever. It’s sixty-six. I know for a fact.”

“She said so. She admitted it. What else did she lie about?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Well.” He swung his legs back and forth. “You ever see an animal that was half lion and half bird?” He crossed his arms. “It sounded real fakey to me.”

“It could happen,” I said. I had to improvise, to outrage him. “I read in this newspaper my mom bought in the supermarket about this scientist, this mad scientist in the Swiss Alps, and he’s been putting genes and chromosomes and stuff together in test tubes, and he combined a human being and a hamster.” I waited, for effect. “It’s called a humster.”

“You never.” Carl was staring at me, his mouth open, his terrible bad breath making its way toward me. “What newspaper was it?”

“The National Enquirer,” I said, “that they sell next to the cash registers.” When I saw his look of recognition, I knew I had him. “And this mad scientist,” I said, “his name was, um, Dr. Frankenbush.” I realized belatedly that this name was a mistake and waited for Carl to notice its resemblance to the name of the other famous mad master of permutations, but he only sat there.

“A man and a hamster?” He was staring at me, squinting, his mouth opening in distaste. “Jeez. What’d it look like?”

When the bus reached my stop, I took off down our dirt road and ran up through the backyard, kicking the tire swing for good luck. I dropped my books on the back steps so I could hug and kiss our dog, Mr. Selby. Then I hurried inside. I could smell brussels sprouts cooking, my unfavorite vegetable. My mother was washing other vegetables in the kitchen sink, and my baby brother was hollering in his yellow playpen on the kitchen floor.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, hopping around the playpen to kiss her. “Guess what?”

“I have no idea.”

“We had this substitute today, Miss Ferenczi, and I’d never seen her before, and she had all these stories and ideas and stuff.”

“Well. That’s good.” My mother looked out the window in front of the sink, her eyes on the pine woods west of our house. That time of the afternoon her skin always looked so white to me. Strangers always said my mother looked like Betty Crocker, framed by the giant spoon on the side of the Bisquick box. “Listen, Tommy,” she said. “Would you please go upstairs and pick your clothes off the floor in the bathroom, and then go outside to the shed and put the shovel and ax away that your father left outside this morning?”

“She said that six times eleven was sometimes sixty-eight!” I said. “And she said she once saw a monster that was half lion and half bird.” I waited. “In Egypt.”

“Did you hear me?” my mother asked, raising her arm to wipe her forehead