The shovels sunk in around the stones almost eagerly, and when I lifted the first dirt away, the dark, loamy earth that was revealed reminded me of an open wound. I shuddered slightly at the thought but pushed it aside as I went back to digging. It didn’t take us long to realize that the two stones we were digging at weren’t just two stones.  It was the top layer of what at first looked like a rectangular box made of rock about two feet tall. This wasn’t a natural formation, but rather the sides were all fused together somehow from flat pieces of dark stone that actually reminded me of volcanic rock I had seen at the Smithsonian two years earlier.

At first we focused on just gently digging out the rocks, periodically reassuring Harvey that we were there to help him get out as he rustled close by with what I imagined was some combination of curiosity and impatience. Weeks later I went back and broke open one of the rocks to see what was in there. The inside of the stone rectangles that formed the bars of Harvey’s prison were layered like a cake—dark igneous rock followed by brown crystalline rock followed by more igneous, etc. There were a total of nine layers counting the top and bottom thicker outer layers, and the stony containers had been sealed well enough that the crystal layers—what I figured out was rock salt when I checked Aunt Karen’s old encyclopedia set—had not dissolved away over however many years it had been buried in the ground.

Those details became important later on, but when we were setting Harvey free, we were so high on a mixture of excitement and fear that we could hardly think at all, much less focus on anything not directly related to the task at hand. We hadn’t discussed what came next much, although I think there was an unspoken understanding between myself and Rusty that we wanted to take Harvey with us when we left Aunt Karen’s to live with Dad again. It was as though we imagined ourselves characters in some charmingly dim-witted children’s movie where the kids find a friendly monster, fend off the villain that wants to kill/capture/etc. the beast, and ultimately either find a way to keep the monster permanently or say a tearful and heartfelt goodbye after their adventures have run on for ninety minutes or so.

The problem with stories like that is how unrealistic they are. Not because they involve monsters—as should be obvious by now, I can’t dispute that there are strange creatures in the world that I don’t think can be explained, at least not within the framework of what is commonly known and accepted. No, the problem lies with how the monster is treated.