Amphibian Read Free Page A

you’ and ‘Aren’t you a cute little kid,’ but that’s not what their faces say. He reminded me of the alligator snapper turtle, which has a bright pink tongue that looks like a worm that lures fish right into his mouth. Or like one of those shiny cards that if you tilt it one way you see one thing but if you tilt it the other way, you see something different.
    Afterwards, I asked my mother if she actually liked that man. She said she likes his company.
    I said, ‘Is that man going to be your boyfriend?’
    She paused for a moment – too long of a moment, if you ask me. Then she said, ‘Phin, I enjoy Brent’s company. We have a lot in common. Listen, Phin, if I ever were to have a boyfriend, it would never come as a surprise, okay?’
    I said, ‘Good, because bad surprises upset my homeostatis.’ I learned that word in
Discover
magazine, but I had never had a chance to use it until then. When a person’s homeostatis is upset, he feels uncomfortable and is motivated to do something about it. For example, if you are cold, you will shiver and get a sweater. I didn’t want to think about what I would be motivated to do if Mom made that man her boyfirend.
    Besides, my mother and he would make a funny-looking pair. They would be different than most mammals since the male isusually bigger than the female. There are some mammals where the female is bigger, but only a bit bigger. That would be like the spotted hyena. The female spotted hyena has to be bigger than the male in order to stop him from eating her pups.
    Of the species where the female is a lot bigger than the male, many of them are spiders. For example, the average female golden orb spider is twenty centimetres long, but the male is only five to six millimetres long. Some of the golden female orbs are a thousand times bigger than the male. The male is so tiny that he can live on the female’s web and steal her food without her even noticing him. He mates with her usually while she’s eating and is distracted. But if she notices him, she will try to eat him too. I can always hope that happens to Brent.
    My father looks better with my mother, but they got separated when I was eight. I live with my mom because my father travels a lot. He’s a foreign correspondent. Right now he’s in Helsinki. It is six hours later in Helsinki than it is here. That means my dad is living in the future.
    Last night I drew land formations and natural disasters on Reull. Spikequakes are natural disasters where spikes come up out of the ground. Virex is a virus when everything you touch starts to get bigger and bigger and when it’s ten feet big, it explodes and your skin turns purple, then blue, then red, then green. Firex is when you get hotter and hotter but don’t catch on fire, you simply melt into a pool of fluids.
    I showed them to my mother and she said, ‘Wow, Phin, that’s very imaginative. Do any nice things happen on Reull?’
    I said, ‘Sure, there’s Mover Island, a piece of land that moves from place to place. The people who live there could go to sleep near a country like Canada and wake up next to a country like Australia or Greenland. The problem is, they’re hardly ever dressed for the weather and sometimes freeze or boil to death in their beds.’ That got me thinking about Lyle, who I would like to put on Mover Island.
    At lunchtime I was swinging and playing a game in my imagination – until Lyle came along. In the game, I was swinging over a big gully. The object of the game was to swing high enough so that my feet looked like they were touching a certain cloud in the sky. If they couldn’t touch that cloud, I would be sucked into a gully of brain suckers. I had fun doing that until Lyle came over and did an under-duck and pushed me out of my swing. I landed in brain-sucker gully and was really mad. So I yelled some Gaelic words at him and then called him a