The Trolls of Lake Maebiewahnapoopie by Jeff White - HTML preview

Epilogue: The Trolls of Lone Tree High

And so, dear reader, we come to the end of our story. The trolls, having lost one home, have found their way to a new one. The town of Lone Tree, once a small town little worthy of comment, had an exciting 24 hours that almost no one knew about until afterwards, and now is once again a small town little worthy of comment. Now, however, it sports the Lone Tree Monster Museum, a zoo of sorts that houses a dozen trolls. A few thousand people a year come through town to visit the museum, where they tour the grounds and read educational signage and watch the beasts on closed-circuit television. Very occasionally, someone catches a glimpse of a live troll; these few folks are allowed the opportunity to buy an exclusive t-shirt. The shirt featured a harrowing portrait of Schmoozeglutton on the front, and a few words on the back: “I have seen a monster.” The t-shirts, among other items, were available for sale at Moon’s Monster Emporium, a new business on the shore of the lake.

At first, it had been unclear that the town was going to allow the trolls to remain in the school. In fact, a town meeting was called to order on that Saturday afternoon expressly to discuss the problem of ejecting the trolls. Fred Chickweed attended that meeting; before things had progressed too far, he piped up with the opinion that the trolls were for the moment contained; perhaps they should just leave them there. After all, they didn’t want monsters having free reign on the streets. Lone Tree High thus became a zoo, which folks had to admit wasn’t too much of a change.

The creation of the Museum, of course, left Principal Klieglight without a job. The residents of Lone Tree, though, realized that a work history consisting of elementary school teaching followed by a position in public school administration left Klieglight thoroughly unprepared for the real world. They took pity on him, and hired him to be the manager of the new facility. And, recognizing that behind every manager must be a person who actually knows what is going on, they hired Ms. Blandishment to be his assistant.

Mr. Klieglight, now on a Wednesday through Sunday schedule, would remain in his newly-fortified office during business hours, regaling visitors with facts about the monsters over his I9000 Communications Nexus:

“Ladies and gentlemen, fellow students, and children of all ages. What you see before you are creatures heretofore unknown to man. Scientists refer to them as Troglodytes Maebiewahnapoopicus. They are nocturnal creatures, awake at night and largely quiescent during the day. While their natural diet is presumed to be carnivorous, they seem quite content to eat hamburgers and tater tots. Please remain behind the fence at all times; these monsters are presumed to be dangerous.”

At first, Klieglight was unhappy that he was no longer principal. Soon, however, he began to take to his new position. Ultimately, he found that he preferred trolls to children. The tourists, he found, inhabited not too much lower a standard of intelligence and comportment than his former students.

Mr. Klieglight hired the high school cafeteria lady, as well. Monsters, she informed him, needed to eat more than just pizza. The cafeteria was perfectly suited to rolling out hundreds of burgers a day, or thin Salisbury steaks with lumpy gravy, or chicken nuggets. They already had a dozen 50 pound bags of tater tots in the freezer, and a delivery system in place to acquire more. It was unclear whether the trolls appreciated these different foods, or whether they just loved the ketchup that the cafeteria lady used in abundance. For the trolls, ketchup became a food group unto itself. This, the cafeteria lady was just fine with. For her, ketchup was a vegetable.

There was one thing, though, that the trolls wouldn’t eat. No matter how much ketchup she poured over them, the trolls wouldn’t touch her cafeteria hot dogs.

The cafeteria lady wasn’t fully comfortable with the eating habits of the trolls, who in their long lives hadn’t learned many table manners. Armed with her two foot long spatula, however, she took them in hand and straightened them up to teenage standards. It wasn’t much of a stretch.

Miss Kimberlane, the school’s janitor, was hired as well. At first, it was thought that her services wouldn’t be required; the trolls preferred a place not too neatly kept. It soon became obvious, however, that the humans visiting the Lone Tree Monster Museum created more than enough refuse to keep her busy, and more.

Lori Bradshaw’s video journalism did indeed make it to the small screen. A clip of Mayor King holding onto Boopsie and declaring that there were no monsters in Lone Tree, followed by a clip of the monsters of Lone Tree, ran in a continuous loop for a full news cycle. Before long, the town’s citizens rose up and recalled Mayor King. In his place, they installed the hero of the day, Fred Chickweed. If a man was practical enough to deliver pizzas, it was heard said, then he was better suited to a leadership position than the yahoo currently in office.

Those of us who know Fred Chickweed will suspect that he won’t be more than a single term mayor himself, but who knows? Lesser men have made whole careers out of public service. In any case, he will be mayor for more than long enough to reroute a portion of the law enforcement budget toward installing a red phone in his office, buying a sports car, and having an orange chicken painted on its hood. He’s already thumbing through car magazines.

Lori Bradshaw was offered a job at the Lone Tree Sentinel. It was the paper’s policy to employ only high school graduates, but on the other hand they didn’t want to be scooped again by a high school student with no journalism credentials. Better to hire her outright. Lori started off with a bang by writing an editorial wondering if Moon Park should be renamed to its old moniker, Mosquehenna Park. Weren’t there enough Moons already?

The spirit of the column carried as far as The Black Hat Man’s Odiferous Honky Tonk and Outlaw Saloon, where the regulars took it upon themselves to rename the town as well: they called it Lone Stump.

While the residents of Lone Tree thought that they had caged the trolls within the school, the trolls felt otherwise. In their estimation, they had tricked the townspeople out of the biggest above-ground cave in town. For the trolls, it was a sign of their obvious superiority to the puny creatures of the land. One sign of many.

For the most part, they enjoyed their new above-ground cave. It had obviously been built for those who enjoy dark, smelly places. They especially enjoyed the library. There, they dumped over the shelves of books, and created their beds amongst them. Book piles weren’t as classical as rock piles for sleeping, but they were more comfortable. They grudgingly admitted that the land trolls must be smart to have so many books. Land troll or not, you could bury yourself in a pile of books and sleep soundly for hours at a time. Schmoozeglutton found a book called Unabridged Dictionary that made a mighty fine pillow. And also a good weapon.

At first, the trolls considered the above-ground cave to be temporary quarters. As time passed, however, they began to consider it to be their home. As they fought their little in-battles that were the lifeblood of any band of trolls, the brick walls became less regular. Once-unmarred walls came to have trollsized holes within them. The school, over time, became ever more cave-like, ever more smelly, ever more comfortable. And the food was excellent.

They never saw the land troll that was nominally their leader. He preferred to rule, evidently, from a distance. But while they never saw him, they heard his powerful voice every now and again. It came from everywhere, echoing up and down the corridors of the above-ground cave.

Schmoozeglutton was ever on the lookout for this land troll. He tried to maintain a ready supply of gut-air for the moment that he saw him. It was difficult, containing the mother of all belches within himself, ever unreleased. It made him walk with a bit of a stiff gait. Also, it interfered with his digestion. But Schmoozeglutton had what it took to be a leader. All he needed was the opportunity to win back that position. The time would come, he knew. Woe to the land troll when Schmoozeglutton had the chance to challenge him.

The Rabid Band was happy with their new leader, though. It wasn’t such a bad thing, they thought, having a leader who was mostly absent. Brumvack had left a bad taste in their mouths. They were beginning to see how readily he had manipulated them, how cynically he had bent them to his will.

The trolls, in their new home, became ever more fat and lethargic. Soon, they had regained all the pounds they had lost through the course of the Big Sleep. Regained those, and then some. They liked it that way. It turned out that a high school is the ideal environment for trolls. It provided almost no intellectual stimulation. It encouraged boredom and somnolence. Its dank, unfriendly atmosphere created just the aura of oppression craved by creatures who had spent centuries underground.

The trolls, it must be said, have more tough times ahead of them. If they stopped to think about it, which they didn’t, they would realize that their lifespan is far longer than that of the creatures they are now counting on to take care of them. They would realize that they are a dying breed, the last known band of trolls in a world once rich with troll-kind. They would realize, for gosh sakes, that there wasn’t a female troll amongst them, and so the chances of propagating their species was remote. Perhaps it will someday occur to them that they should be exploring whatever underground world they can discover for others like themselves. Perhaps they will someday come to understand that because they inhabit a zoo, with every one of their needs seen to by others, they will become weak, that their culture will be shredded, that their hold on dignity will be threatened.

But for now, the trolls are happy. Where once they sat around the central room of their cave eating slabs of bone-headed dinosaur fish, they now sit in the dimly-lit cafeteria of the school, eating all manner of institutional food. Their bellies are just as full, their eyes have that same satisfied glazed-over look, and their dreams are small, manageable ones, of trolls fights and beer nights and belching contests.

The reader might almost imagine that they are as happy as they ever were in their pre-ice age existence. Indeed, though their surroundings are different, in every other way the trolls look much as they ever did.

 Except for the ketchup stains.