About Instar

Alex and Gabe are inseparable cousins, ready to enjoy a leisurely summer together catching fish and snakes at their neighborhood Frog Pond.  Alex is the kind of 12-year-old that is not afraid to build a raft out of scavenged Styrofoam and pallets, or to research bioluminescent crustaceans when he thinks he has caught one.  Gabe just wants an adventure, and he’s thrilled when he and Alex fish one up from the silty bottom of the Frog Pond.

Out for a clandestine boat ride on the first night of summer, Alex and Gabe look down into the water to find a glowing sphere, which quickly hatches into a dangerous problem. Lots of legs, tentacles, claws, and flashing lights, the creature is like nothing the cousins have ever seen. Sometimes you see what you want. Alex hopes and believes he has discovered a new species, and Gabe is convinced that this is an alien. Either way, they do their best to keep hold of the fast-growing creature in their basement, but it burns through a plastic bucket and tunnels away, starting a dangerous chase.  Their search for answers leads them to the nursing home door of the discredited Dr. Michael Michaels, who caught and lost a creature of his own decades ago, threw away his reputation, and wants redemption.  In a race against the conspiracy-minded Michaels to capture and control the creature, Alex and Gabe discover the strength of their friendship, resolve, and ingenuity.

The first few pages of Instar follow.  If you want to read more, please reach out.

Prologue

Alex called his cousin so often that his fingers could practically dial the numbers on their own.  But today he was so excited that he hit the wrong button twice and had to start over.

“Gabe, get over here right now!  They’re hatching.

Alex hung up and rushed back to the aquarium in the corner of his bedroom. Lucy, his overstuffed golden retriever, lounged on a musty old pillow in the middle of the floor.  Alex had to push her out of the way to get a good view of the aquarium. “Lucy, move it!”  Lucy hopped up, nuzzled Alex´s hand with her chilly nose, wagged her tail against his leg a few times, ambled a few feet over, and flopping back down with a harrumph.

Half a dozen aquariums sat on a low shelf, which Alex had built from scrapped two-by-fours and stacks of cinder blocks.  They weren´t your usual aquariums, with a school of neon tetras flashing around a bubbling pirate chest above a seafloor of turquoise rocks.  They were brownish, and a little mossy.  One held a bobbing brown and green box turtle on a rock that poked up from the water, and a pair of crawdads scuttled slowly along the bottom.  Another held a pair of small frogs.  A third held five fat tadpoles, with golf ball heads and tiny back legs.  The oldest aquariums had long cracks running up their sides, and had been relegated to terrariums – one with a baby garter snake and one with a hairy tiger-striped tarantula. Alex called it the zoo, and its residents cycled in and out of captivity as he and Gabe captured creatures at the Frog Pond, brought them home, and inevitably had to release the least interesting animal to make room for the new specimen.

Alex had always liked crawdads best.  At first glance, they were the most repulsive creatures from the Frog Pond.  They had dead round eyes that sat atop stubby protruding heads.  Their mouths were a mass of moving, grasping parts. Their eight little legs moved like those of a centipede, and their guts were just a bunch of mustard.  But they had good qualities too.  Their strong tails could carry them out of reach with one powerful jolt.  Their claws were the color of ivory, fading into hues of blue and red, and eventually to brown.  The claws could swing almost – but not quite – all the way around, and could hurt you bad if you didn´t pick them up just right.  And, of course, there was the fact that crawdads were basically miniature lobsters that turned bright red when you boiled them.  Alex´s mom made a point of saying how disgusting crawdads were, but Alex new for a fact that in New Orleans people ate whole heaping piles of crawdads with lemon slices.  They didn’t taste like lobster, but considering you could catch them in the Frog pond, they weren’t half bad.

In one aquarium, a broken-off reed was taped into a corner with two strips of masking tape.  A mass of alien-looking jelly eggs clung to the reed, with a tiny brown tadpole flipping lightly in each one.  Every few seconds, an egg would burst, the tadpole would stick momentarily to the reed, then flick its tail a few times and drop into the water.

After about half the tadpoles had hatched, Gabe came bursting into Alex’s room.  He didn’t knock.  Didn’t need to. 

“You totally missed it, exclaimed Alex. “One of the crawdads got a tadpole as soon as it hit the water.  It was down there lurking on the bottom, like it was just waiting.  And then the tadpole hatched and it wasn´t in the water even one second before the crawdad nailed it.  Grabbed it with a claw and ate it.  It was kind of awesome.  But then I put them in another aquarium.”

“Oh, check it out.” Gabe exclaimed, “One just hatched.  Cool!  I get half of them right?” 

“What do you mean half of them?” Alex turned and gave Gabe a hard look.  “I found the eggs, and I kept them here for the last three weeks. They’re mine.”

“Yeah, but you caught them using my equipment,” said Gabe.

 “What equipment?  I just reached out and broke off the reed.”

“You took them home in my bucket.  Come on man.  Let me have some!” pleaded Gabe, sensing he had a weak claim.

“Yeah, ok, have a couple.  But you have to take care of them.  You can’t let them die like that monarch butterfly chrysalis I gave you.” Alex had always liked to be prepared, so he had already researched all about how to take care of the frogs eggs and the tadpoles.  Gabe played things by ear, and Alex was reluctant to send any of his new tadpoles home with him.

“Don’t be a know-it-all,” said Gabe, “you know the chrysalis wasn’t my fault.  It just up and died.  I’ll take care of the tadpoles. Besides, you’re the one that let a crawdad eat one of them.”

The Boat

It was the first Saturday of summer vacation. Finally.  Alex and Gabe had practically held their breath through the long spring, watching the days grow clearer and warmer through the dirty windows of the school.  March was always a dreary, dragging month of melting snow. April would bring flashes of summer, and wipe them away with a cold front the next day.  But May was always pure torture, with the days growing longer and warmer, the world waking up, and school just dragging on, each day longer than the last.  Then, finally, Memorial Day would arrive, and they would begin the seemingly endless freedom of summer vacation.

The edges of the Frog Pond were taken up by thickets of tall reeds and pockets of open water.  Each pocket held its own assemblage of life, and the boys had caught nearly every animal the pond had to offer. Crawdads and catfish trolled up from the mucky bottom, frogs snatched from the surface, bluegill that raced through the deeper waters by the old boat dock, big golden carp in the summer and giant tadpoles in the spring. 

Alex had left Lucy at home.  Sometimes it was fun to take the dog to the pond.  They are called retrievers because they loved to retrieve, and Lucy would chase sticks in the water for hours.  Alex had read that they were bred to fetch dead ducks from ponds on hunting trips.  But you couldn´t keep Lucy out of the water, and she scared all the pond animals, and today was for catching animals.

An island sat in the middle of the Frog Pond.  Only ten or twenty feet of open water separated the island from the pond’s banks, leaving it tantalizingly just out of reach.  Older, more calloused hearts might have seen nothing special in the island.  But the boys knew better.  They knew the big bullfrogs that were so rare on the banks of the pond congregated on the island, safely unperturbed.  They could see from afar that the ducks that arrived every spring nested on the island.  And a shining white stork stood on the island all summer, balanced on one leg – although even the boys had no hope of catching it.

Alex and Gabe circled the pond three times.  It was a hot, bright day.  Much hotter than normal.  It made for sweaty hunting, and it drove most of their quarry into hiding. Poking slowly into each little reed-lined bay, watching carefully for the subtle bump of a frog´s head among the weeds, or the sunset glow of a carp below the surface.  But it was a slow afternoon, frustrating, and they only caught a couple little frogs, half a dozen crusty old crawdads and one bluegill – only the last of which they bothered putting in the five-gallon bucket.

 Alex looked longing out at the island, as they sat on the end of the dock, with a single bluegill floating quietly in a bucket behind them. “Maybe we could get a boat.”

“A boat would be rad!”  said Gabe.  “We could go to the island.”

“Yeah, and you wouldn´t even have to swim there.  Remember when you tried?  You didn´t even make it and your mom was so mad when she saw you.” Alex laughed out loud at how fearless his cousin had been, and about how he had only gotten into trouble.

“Ha, yeah, that was awesome.  Even though it didn´t work.  But do you think we could afford a boat?”

“Probably if we split it,” said Alex.

That afternoon they rode their bikes downtown to Ruff’s Sporting Goods.   Ruff’s sold most of what was best in life: bows and arrows, tackle, tents and sleeping bags, and boats.  The inflatable rafts hung high up from the rafters, among the taxidermied heads of trophy elk, deer, javelin, and a misplaced moose.  Straining the necks back to look up at the boats, the boys quickly settled on an orange-and-black inflatable two-seater. The Zephyr.

“I’ve got twenty dollars, how about you?” asked Alex.

“Ten bucks left from my birthday.”

“Not enough.  Not even close.  That raft must cost at least fifty.  Come on, let’s get out of here.”

They walked out onto the dirty sidewalk and unlocked their bikes, hanging their heads in silence. The island was an old goal for both of them, a hope just beyond their reach.  It was more than just the big bullfrogs and duck nests.  If they could get to the island, they would have found the heart of the pond, gone further from the neighborhood than anywhere else.  They would be out of reach of other kids, of their parents, of everything.  Gabe had thought they could camp there, even have a little fire, maybe they could each tell their moms that they were at the others one’s house.  And now it was further than before.  Stupid boat.

They turned the corner and into the alley behind the grocery store, past the stinky dumpster with the old vegetables, and toward the dirt track that cut through an abandoned lot toward Alex’s house.  Then Alex stopped and stood staring at a stack of wooden pallets next to the dumpster.

“What are you looking at?” asked Gabe  

“Check it out!” said Alex.

“A bunch of pallets, big deal,” snipped Gabe, still frustrated about the raft.

“Yeah, pallets.  We can use them to build a raft!”

Alex jogged over to the pallets and picked one up, just to get the heft of it.

“Gabe, come help me out, this thing’s heavy.  Bring the bikes.”

Gabe wheeled the bikes over to the pallets and together they lifted a pallet up and balanced it carefully across the seats and handlebars of the two bikes.  Then they stacked another on top of it, and gingerly, slowly, wheeled them to the pond, and stashed them in the bushes.

They rode back to Alex’s house, hoping off their bikes at the door to the toolshed.   They slipped inside and found a tall stack of dusty, dented styrofoam coolers Alex´s dad had saved from long-ago fishing trips.  Alex took a pair of exact-o-knifes from the top drawer of the tool chest (“the shelf of stuff that cuts,” he said as he reached in carefully among hack saws and band-saw blades), and handed one to Gabe. 

“Cut them down the corners,” he said, slicing quickly down the edge of a cooler to illustrate, “so they are just flat sheets.” 

It only took them a few moments to disassemble the boxes, into a pile of Styrofoam plates, which they slid into garbage bags.  Alex found a hammer and a plastic bag full of old nails, and they carried everything back to the bikes, and piled it on top of the pallets.

As they walked toward the Frog Pond, carefully balancing their unsteady load across their bikes, Alex explained his plans for the raft.  They wouldn´t both fit on one pallet, and it would be too tippy anyway, so they would nail two pallets together, end-to-end.  Pallets float, but probably not so well that two people could use them as a raft.  That´s where the styrofoam came in.  “Nothing floats better than Styrofoam, right?  So we just fill in the empty space in the pallets, and it´s Island-Here-We-Come!”

It was almost dark as they chose a sheltered spot near a big weeping willow, with branches that dropped down into the surface of the pond, creating a leafy cave.  They tipped the pallets off the bikes, and got straight to work, quickly nailing the pallets together and stuffing them with styrofoam.

“Well,” said Gabe, “let´s see what this baby can do.” 

They slid the makeshift raft a few to the edge of the pond and pushed it out into the water. It bobbed, tilted, righted, and floated like a charm.  Gabe reached out and grabbed Alex´s shoulder for balance, and stepped gingerly onto the raft, slowly easing his weight off the land, expecting to find himself hip-deep in pond water.  But the raft held.  In fact, it barely dipped lower into the water.  Gabe bounced up and down a bit, casting little ripples out from the edge of the pallets in widening circles, and smiled at Alex.  He stepped off the raft, leaning onto Alex´s shoulder.  Then they pushed the raft deep into the overhanging willow branches, and walked to Alex´s house in the deepening night.

The Island

Gabe slept over at Alex’s house that night, so they could get an early start the next day. The alarm went off at 5:30, just as the black started to wash out of the eastern sky through Alex´s window.  The boys clambered out of bed and pulled on their pond shoes (new shoes were for school, older shoes were for weekends, and the oldest shoes were for the pond). They grabbed granola bars, and climbed out of Alex’s bedroom window, which opened onto the weedy backyard, where their bikes were waiting.  Alex picked up two big nets, two paddles, and an empty five-gallon paint bucket, and they started off toward the Frog Pond. 

When they got to the pond, Alex and Gabe chained their bikes together underneath the branches of the willow.  Alex climbed into the front of the boat, Gabe passed him the gear, and then flopped into the boat himself as he pushed it out from the shore.

They didn’t waste time before heading toward the island, and they reached it just as the sun climbed up from behind the pine trees on the horizon. 

“Can you believe it?” Alex said.

“We´re going to catch so much stuff over here,” said Gabe.

And the frogging really was good.  Alex spotted a big bullfrog peeking out of the reeds ten feet from the boat and they had it in the bucket a couple minutes later.  He missed another frog a few minutes later.

Half way around the island they saw another bullfrog jump right off the bank and into the water.

Gabe and Alex landed and sat down to eat their granola bars and stared into the edges of the reed thickets, waiting for the big frog to wrongly decide they had gone away.  Its orange open eyes slid up out of the water by the reeds after a few minutes.   Gabe had seen it first, so he slipped his net deep underwater, pushed it slowly under the frog, waited, and then pulled the net quickly up from below.  The frog leapt and flipped in the net, but Gabe grabbed it shut before the frog got out.

“That’s the biggest frog I ever caught!” he hollered.

“Let me see,” said Alex. “Man, look at his legs.  You could totally eat this one.”

“Yeah, maybe I will,” said Gabe, smiling a little maliciously.

But that was the last frog they saw.  A snake slid off through the grass, but that wasn’t too unusual.  Alex pushed through a willow and found an old duck nest, but no eggs.

Lunchtime came and went, and their hunger outgrew their hope of finding more bullfrogs. Alex and Gabe clambered back into the boat, paddled back to their bikes, and went home for sandwiches.

As they ate, they both felt happy with the two bullfrogs jumping periodically into the lid of the bucket, but they were also a little disappointed after years of fantasizing about what the island held. 

“I thought there would be a lot more frogs,” offered Gabe, feeling a little bad for complaining after catching his biggest frog ever.

“Me too,” said Alex through a bite of turkey-on-rye.

“Remember that time we went frogging at night?” asked Gabe.  “There were a lot more frogs at night.”

Alex looked up, catching hold of Gabe’s idea.  “Yeah, and remember how they froze when you shined a flashlight in their eyes?”

“Like deers in headlights,” said Gabe.  “It was almost too easy.”

 “Bet you we could catch a bunch of frogs if went back to the island at night.” 

Night Boating

“There’s no way our moms are going to let us go boating at night,” said Alex.

“Of course they will.  We were down there frogging twice last month.”

“I know, but not in a boat.” Alex looked at his cousin like he was having to explain that the sky is blue. “My mom is going to say we’ll get drowned.”

“Well,” said Gabe, “don´t say anything about a boat.”

And that’s exactly what they did.  They put on their pond shoes like always, packed four extra D batteries for their two flashlights, packed a few more granola bars, and gathered up the nets and buckets.

“Bye Mom,” shouted Alex over his shoulder as he walked quickly out the door, “we’re going to the Frog Pond.”

“You buys didn´t buy a boat like you were saying you wanted to, did you?” asked his mom, “You’ll get drowned.”

“No Mom, of course not! We can´t even afford a boat.”

The cousins rode fast to the pond, flashing conspiratorial smiles about the non-lie and the adventure that lay ahead of them.  The day had been hot, and the heat was still radiating up from the street. 

“It’s so cool riding bikes in the dark.” yelled Gabe, “It’s like there’s nothing underneath you, like you´re flying, like those kids from E.T.”

“That would be so cool,” said Alex, “Can you imagine flying over the woods like that?”

“Flying over the woods would be cool.  But you know what would be really cool? Having an alien like that!”

When they reached the pond, they tucked their bikes into the deep shadows. Alex scanned the banks for the orange reflection shining back at him from the depths of frogs’ eyes. “Eyeshine is pretty good, right?” he said to Gabe. “Can you imagine being able to see frogs’ eyes glowing in the dark during the day?”  But only the pinpoint pink eyeshine of spiders looked back at him.

They slipped into the inky water.  Alex went first, carrying the front of the boat, which he set half into the water.  He moved to the very front of the boat, shifting his weight so he was afloat. Gabe pushed the boat forward.  He stutter-stepped as the back of the boat reached the end of the water, sunk his left foot into the water, which was warm as a bath, and hopped into the boat. They began to slowly paddle across the pond. The night was deep and dark, with just an aura of the crescent moon cast onto the thin clouds, and a pair of sodium yellow streetlights where the road ended at the dock. 

The boys paddled as quietly as they could, and when they got close to the outer edge of the reed banks that surrounded the island, Alex tucked his paddle into the space between the boards of the pallet, and turned on his flashlight.

“Over there,” Alex whispered at the very bottom of his lungs.  “I can see one, right there by that long stick there.  Go slow.”

Gabe paddled slowly and silently.   When they got close to the frog, he switched his paddle for a net, and easily scooped up the comatose frog.

“Dude.  Man.  That was way too easy!”  exalted Gabe.  “Like deers in headlights!”

“You know what we could do?  We could tape a net onto the top of the paddle, so we wouldn’t even have to switch them around.” Alex had invented more than one piece of gear for them.  An extra-long net, a bucket lid that only opened inward, a crawdad trap. 

“Yeah, good idea.  But, like, tomorrow.  Right now, let’s catch some frogs.”

The cousins rounded a rocky point that jutted from the island after half an hour with half a dozen fat bullfrogs croaking in the bucket.

“There,” Alex pointed. “Another one.”  The boys had stopped whispering three frogs ago, after they realized that once you had them in the flashlight, they wouldn’t try to escape even if you bumped them on the head with your net.

Gabe paddled swiftly over to the frog, but as they approached it, both boys realized together that it wasn’t the reflected orange of a frog’s eyeshine that they had seen.  It wasn’t an animal at all – couldn’t be.  The light was at the bottom of the pond, a shimmering pearly violet down among the reeds. 

“What is that?” asked Gabe.

“I don’t know. A fish?”

“Dude, it’s not a fish,” said Gabe.  “It’s not even an animal.  But look at it.  It’s glowing and dancing.”

“I don’t think so.  I think that’s just the way the water is refracting the light,” said Alex.

“Refracting my butt.  That light is moving.”

Alex stowed his paddle and pushed his net down in the water to scoop up the light.  The short pole wouldn’t reach the bottom, a good ten feet deep.    Peering down into the water, they saw the lighted thing well beyond the tip of the net.

Alex was the first to offer an idea. “We could go get some duct tape at my house, and attach the net to the paddle, maybe then it will reach.”

“Too slow.  Besides, even then it might be too deep.” 

“It must be pretty bright,” said Alex. “I mean, I thought it was just a couple feet down, but to be shining light that bright from way down there.”

“Dude, I’m going to get in.  We can´t lose this thing.”  Gabe had never hesitated to wade into the Frog Pond, or any other muck, if he was after something he wanted. With this glowing prize just a few feet below the end of the net, he wasn’t about to paddle back to shore and ride all the way home for duct tape. 

“Our moms are going to freak out if you show up wet all the way to your ears.”

And as he hopped lightly out of the boat, Gabe said “Don´t worry so much.”

Gabe plunged his head underwater for a moment, rooted around in the muck.  His eyes were closed against the silt he kicked up, as he blindly grasped for the light. He ran out of breath, pivoted upward and kicked against the muck. When his head broke the surface of the pond, Gabe gasped for breath twice, glanced down to get his bearings, and plunged underwater again.  On the third dive, his hand brushed against a new texture.  He felt something leathery and tough, but smooth as grape jelly.  He reached out with both hands and grasped the thing just as his breath ran out again.  He held on tightly, kicked downward, and pushed victoriously toward the surface.

Meanwhile, Alex had piloted the raft to the island, tied it to a branch, and climbed out onto the shore. He sat on a large rock, watching his cousin dive and trying to catch another glimpse of the light.

Then Gabe came out of the water holding the thing in his hands.  It cast a soft glow upwards across his face from just below the surface of the water.  It was pale violet, shifting smoothly to blue and then green.  The ripples of the pond broke the light into undulations across Gabe´s face.  The shadows of his chin and nose and eyebrows were all cast upward, backward, reminding Alex of what his cousin looked like when he held a flashlight up to his chin to tell ghost stores.  Only now, Gabe had a completely different look on his face.  Instead of the mask of seriousness held carefully to hide his giggling enjoyment at telling scary stories of aliens and monsters, Gabe now had an expression of pure, innocent, wonder.

“Oh my God.  Alex, look at this.”