Lagoon 

From the note before Lagoon we learn that the character, Meredith Cherry, 18, lives in Armitage, a small town in east Ohio, in the autumn of 1954.  She tells us that the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who is always in her dreams, is now in town, having migrated from one body of water to another, and ending up in Grim Lake.  At night he crawls out of the lake and sneaks across town to her house.  She thinks he must love her to have left his Lagoon for her, or else he really wants to eat her.  She used to hear him at night fumbling in the kitchen but he has started coming upstairs.  Lying in bed pretending to be asleep she hears the door creak open and squishy footsteps on the carpet and feels his breath on her.  In the morning, she says, there are wet spots on the carpet and in the bed and bits of water grass.  She says she thinks about the Creature all the time, ever since she first saw him at the Drive In Movie from the back seat of Jim Rainey’s Chevy.  She says so far the Creature has been a gentleman and she wonders if he senses that she is pregnant.  Some nights, when he doesn’t come, she walks around downstairs, looking for him.  When she goes for long walks in the dark she can hear the Creature following her.  She says she tries to read her future in the tarot cards she was given at the curiosity shop.  She wonders if Ben saw her on the sofa with Jim Rainey on top of her when she was babysitting.  She says her mother made her father’s life a living hell and now she will do the same when she tells him she is pregnant.  Jim told her not to worry but they found him the next morning cut to pieces on the railroad tracks with a duffel bag full of clothes.  They said he had been drinking but she knows the Creature pushed him in front of the train as he tried to leave town.  She says the Creature is the voice in her head, telling her to walk into the lake, and then she would never have to tell her father.  But she says she can’t because of the stranger inside her, although it must be very peaceful in the dark water at the bottom of the Lagoon where her beloved monster waits for her.