Pressie’s Carcass
By Jonathan Mann
I remember when they found her. They brought in a truck crane, wrung the cable around her neck and hauled her from Lake Superior’s shores like a dead animal. Even though that’s what she was, I think. Dead for sure, but I didn’t really know about animal. I still don’t.
None of us really knew what to make of Pressie.
It was late February in Marquette, and although spring was on its way, it was still gray and cold outside. Not cold enough, however, to freeze much of the lake, where clumps of ice floated near the shores. In fact, I thought she was one of those at first—a giant clump of ice. But there were too many people standing on the shore watching them drag her out, and too many news cameras, and too many police cars for her to just be an iceberg. There were a couple of Humvees and soldiers carrying carbines. It wasn’t until I got closer that I realized they were hauling out a dark blue dinosaur.
As bizarre as the scene was, even now I don’t think it was that out of place. That’s just Michigan.
The news channels dubbed the creature Pressie, and the marine biologists—and, funny enough, the paleontologists—told us she was a female. However, the paleontologists explained that Pressie wasn’t exactly a dinosaur. They threw out terms like wastebasket taxon and morphology and molar carnassials, all terms I didn’t even pretend to know. I was living in Marquette studying political science at the time, and a few days before Pressie’s corpse was dragged from the water, I came to the unfortunate realization that I wanted nothing to do with politics or law. It was by pure coincidence that I stumbled upon the scene of them collecting Pressie’s carcass, and perhaps it was this coincidence in combination with my newfound aimlessness that I became infatuated with this creature.
I stayed for the duration of the carcass collection. I watched them load her onto a big rig, throw a tarp over her, and haul her away.
When I returned to my apartment, I found my housemates watching the scene on the news. They both studied political science as well. One would go on to become top of his class at Cornell Law, while the other would go on to become a top advisor to a Republican state congressional candidate, only to be fired a year later after he was caught masturbating on a Zoom call.
Both of them gaped at the television.
This is going to change the entire socio-political landscape, the one who would be later caught masturbating said.
If it’s even real, the other one said. He was more dubious in his temperament, which is probably why he became such a good lawyer.
How do we know this isn’t just a publicity stunt to increase tourism up here?
He had a point. Everyone seemed to forget that we existed in the U.P. Mom and Dad were no exception. I watched the news with my housemates, but I refrained from telling them that I had actually seen the carcass. I worried they’d get jealous.
They took Pressie’s carcass to an undisclosed warehouse near the university we studied at, though many of us could easily guess the specific one on account of the Humvees stationed outside 24/7. On many nights throughout the spring, we’d get drunk on Miller Lite and would drive in circles around the warehouse at one a.m. trying to catch a glimpse of the creature. We had nothing better to do.
The president was pissed because he wanted the carcass transported to a secure naval research laboratory, but the governor wanted the carcass to stay here. The Canadians were pissed too because they shared Lake Superior with us and wanted their claim to Pressie’s fame. The president, publicly, told them to screw off, albeit in kinder verbiage.
To the governor’s point, the marine biologists, paleontologists, and all the other scientists who were examining the carcass feared they might lose valuable information if the carcass were to be transported again. Because of the decomposition, they said. And freezing Pressie would’ve been a pain in the ass due to her size.
If this was a publicity stunt, it was certainly working. Mere hours after the videos of Pressie’s carcass were broadcasted, thousands of tourists flooded into Marquette. The town became too crowded, and I often couldn’t find a coffee shop or store that wasn’t slammed with people carrying binoculars and sporting cheap t-shirts that said She swam in Superior! adorned with little clipart Pressies.
Every boat owner began giving tours of the lake and telling appropriated and non-factual Indigenous mythology about Pressie. Some shop vendors were even charging thirty bucks for sand in mason jars.
This is the same sand that the carcass had laid in before they collected her, the vendors would say. The dark spots are her blood!
A local grunge band even changed their name to “Pressie’s Carcass,” and you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing one of their songs on the local radio. They sounded like a pair of dice rattling in an empty Coke can, by the way.
Have you seen any signs of Pressie? Mom would ask when she called to check up on me.
No. She’s dead, remember.
Ope, you’re right. I always forget. Hear back from any law schools yet?
Whenever Mom and Dad called, they’d always ask when a good weekend to come visit would be, but I told them to hold off until graduation. I told them to wait because there were too many tourists, but in reality I didn’t want them asking me about my plans for after college. I had gotten into some decent law schools, but I had no intention of attending any of them. I spent most of my days at the library or at coffee shops doing research on Pressie instead of figuring out what I was going to do with my life. The tourists’ presence might have annoyed me, but their infatuation with Pressie didn’t. I understood them because I too was obsessed.
More information about her trickled out online and in the news over the next few months. The scientists estimated her age to be between 70 and 100 years old and confirmed she died of natural causes. She had a diet consisting of large fish and some small mammals, was diadromous, and from head to tail measured 30 feet in length. Strangely, she possessed physical traits seen in both marine reptiles and marine mammals. They said that if there were males in her species, then they might either be half her size or double it.
There might be more of them out there! my housemate, the one who’d become a political advisor, said. What if a whole secret nest of Pressies is just living in Lake Superior? Wouldn’t that be crazy?
I told him that’d just be Michigan for you.
I checked out Pressie-adjacent books from the library, and I spent hours reading and annotating them. I began with books on paleontology, reading up on marine dinosaurs like the elasmosaurus and the plesiosaur and the liopleurodon. Next, I moved to biology and zoology, looking into rapid adaptation and the categorization of threatened and extinct animal species. After this, I turned to Indigenous anthropology and folklore studies, researching the myths of the region and how nobody in the modern era knew Pressie existed until she washed up dead on the shores of Marquette, Michigan. None of this research did me any good for anything in particular.
The university brought in scientists who were actively studying Pressie, and they gave lectures to us in overstuffed halls. They discussed taxonomy and how the landscape of zoology changes with the discovery of a new species, as well as the various folkloric-cultural lenses through which we could view this situation. They answered our questions too like, Does this mean Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster are also real? and, What is the plausibility of genetically making another Pressie, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? and, How much money can we make off of this and what’s the timeframe for when a studio will purchase the film rights to Pressie?
Did you hear that the government has created a program to investigate creatures like Pressie? I asked my Cornell-bound housemate. You know, monsters from myth and legend? They’re called cryptids.
The government didn’t make any new cryptid research program, he said, somewhat cynically, I might add.
No?
No. That’s because they’ve had the program all along. They’re only making it public now because they want China to feel like they’re behind us on research.
I remember the news stations kept throwing around photos on the news of pictographs from Agawa Rock at the Lake Superior Provincial Park. The pictographs were drawn by the Ojibwe Tribe centuries earlier. The most notable of these pictographs has four distinct images all next to one another. The first is a canoe with five passengers. The second is the Great Lynx, also called the Mishipeshu. The third and fourth images are two serpents. Nobody knew if the serpent or the Mishipeshu was supposed to be the depiction of Pressie. On a slow weekend just after spring break, I made the four-and-a-half-hour drive into Canada to view the pictographs, and I wasn’t disappointed. I took a girl I had been seeing on and off with me. It wasn’t her cup of tea, and after that, apparently neither was I. That might’ve been for the best. Apparently Mom and Dad didn’t find the tattoo sleeve on her right arm to be as attractive as I did.
I couldn’t tell if the rest of the world maintained the same level of interest as we in Marquette all seemed to have with Pressie. We very much lived in a bubble, even after we gained the international spotlight. After a while, the president and the governor stopped arguing. The tourists slowly trickled down. The news channels stopped covering the subject on primetime. They moved to more important subjects like the Russo-Ukrainian War and the IARC categorizing aspartame as a group 2B carcinogen and Taylor Swift’s struggle to find a husband.
I met with my political science advisor around the time when I should’ve been making my law school decision, and she asked me how it was coming. I told her I wasn’t planning on going to law school anymore. I had known since before Pressie. My advisor seemed a bit taken aback that I hadn’t told her and asked, quite aggressively, what my plan was now.
I don’t have a plan, I told her.
She asked what my parents’ opinion was on the matter. She had gone to U of M with my mother, as it happened, and they were Facebook friends.
I haven't told them yet.
If you don’t mind me asking, she said without waiting for my approval, what have you been doing since the time you knew you weren’t going?
They say everything blooms when the weather warms, but I discovered this isn’t always true. Despite their best efforts to slow the decomposition process, the marine biologists informed the public that Pressie’s blue-scaled corpse was breaking down faster than they had expected. It would be harder for them to discover much else about her. We heard rumors they thought about freezing the carcass. If anyone came within a mile radius of her warehouse home, they could smell death in the air. My housemates and I had stopped going to check the place out by now.
Near the end of the semester, I received an angry email from a first-year student library assistant who had spent three hours erasing all of my notations out of the returned library books. I replied that I didn’t much appreciate his threatening tone and that he had bigger things he should be worrying about. Then I forwarded the email to the student-employee administrator and to campus safety.
The weekend before graduation the government transported what remained of Pressie’s carcass out of Marquette. The event was not announced to the public, but of course we who lived there found out and lined the streets and watched the Humvees escort the carcass to an undisclosed naval research laboratory. My university requested that, when the government completed their research, they receive the skeleton of Pressie to hang in the science building. The university president argued that, after all, it was discovered not ten minutes from their campus. I don’t believe that that request was ever approved.
I graduated with a diploma I didn’t plan on using and fifty thousand dollars in student debt. Suffice it to say, commencement weekend was a little tense with the family. Mom was angry with me, and Dad didn’t feel like arguing with either of us. After I moved back home, I didn’t think about Pressie as much. Maybe it was because I wasn’t living in the heat of it anymore. Maybe it was because nobody else seemed to care. She was a nice distraction, and at least everything turned out alright for me anyways.
But I can’t help but think back to those few months sometimes when I drive past a lake or hear news from the connections I had made up there. Each time I recollect those memories I keep coming back to the same conclusion about that weird creature. Pressie was no different than humans. I think she did what we do best: wander around aimlessly without anyone really noticing us. Only after we drop dead from stress or a heart attack or natural causes do those still living start to pay attention and attempt to figure out what our life was all about. So perhaps it’s not for a lack of searching that we haven’t found another Pressie or any cryptid for that matter. I simply think the creatures are in too big of a sea to get noticed so easily.
Jonathan Mann is a graduate of Hope College. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Butler University, and his work has been featured in plain china, The Under Review, and is forthcoming in House of Zolo's Journal of Speculative Literature. He teaches English and serves as the co-fiction editor for Booth. You can find him at jonathanmannwrites.com.