“Hey John how’s my boy” Grandpa said without looking up from the piece of wood he was working on
“Hi” John panted” I came as fast as I could”
“What’s your rush I don’t seem to recall anything all that important?”
“Grandpa!” John exclaimed”Remember you said you would tell me all about the sea monsters. We went down and saw one and then you told me that you had seen one too and that you named him Bob and…”John trailed off as he noticed the look of amusement on his Grandpas face “That’s not funny”
Grandpa chuckled “Sure it is, just maybe a little more for me than you. All right come have a seat and I’ll tell you all about Bob”
“Now I know you probably have this great idea in your head that Bob and I became friends for life but it turns out he doesn’t live here he was just born here. Its part of the reason they aren’t seen very often not to mention there just aren’t enough people here to see them even if they lived here all the time.
I spent a little over a year with Bob and I’ve been waiting ever since for him to come back. See I figured out that whatever these creatures are they only come to Eyas Cove to breed.” Grandpa looked at John “You know what that means?”
“Yeah it means have babies right?”
“Yes exactly, I never saw him again but I saw others like him. They usually only stay for a few months when they come in, a little more than 3 months I’d say, they always leave before the water gets really cold.
Bob stayed for so long I suppose because he was hurt and by the time he was strong again the seasons had changed. I think he got stuck here. More came the next year although different adult then the ones I had seen with him the year before; these ones had different markings. When it came time for them to leave with their baby they took Bob with them too.
He could just as easily been left here for years I don’t know if he could have found the others on his own and sometimes it’s years between a pair of them coming in to the cove. From what I’ve been able to tell they only breed once every 20 years or so.
I have a bunch of notebooks here they have all the information I recorded over the years. I’ve seen lots of them over the years they all have different markings and I’ve only seen the same ones a handful of times and only in the past few years.
I made notebooks here of all the ones I’ve seen, I sketched out their markings and wrote down everything else I noticed about them” Grandpa nodded toward a little cabinet that John had never even noticed before which hung open. ”Go grab that top one there it should be Bob’s I’ve been looking at them again since the pair that’s in the cove showed up.
John hopped off his stool and walked over to the cabinet pulling the door open the rest of the way. As the light reached into the recesses of the cabinet John’s mouth fell open a bit it was full of little bits of things even a few carvings of the creatures. John could spend hours looking through all the stuff in this cabinet and not find the bottom.
John picked the top most notebook of the shelf and saw a messy scrawl very much like his own which simply read “Bob 1931 –“ Johns breath caught in his throat, somehow holding this book in his hand made them seem so much more real even after having seen the little one so up close this was different. This wasn’t Grandpa playing along he saw the one tonight and he’d been seeing others for more than 50 years.
