By Ed Staskus

   Sally the Loch Ness Monster’s kid sister was sick and tired of being bottled up. She was sick and tired of the amateur monster hunters, scuba diving from one end of the loch to the other searching for her and Nessie. She didn’t like the scientists with their gimcracks. She was sick and tired of the tourists. The loch used to be home sweet home. Not anymore. It was time to move on.

   Nessie decided to stay put. She was the older of the sisters and was going to hold down the fort. She packed a lunch for Sally and wished her bon voyage. They coiled themselves around one another and hugged goodbye. They stayed dry-eyed because they didn’t know how to cry,

   The Loch Legend started in the 6^th century when St. Columba was taking a stroll on the banks of the River Ness in Scotland. He saw a man being buried. The mourners explained the dead man had been swimming in the river when he was attacked by a “water beast” that dragged him underwater. They tried to rescue him, but he was killed. St. Columba sent one of his monks to test the waters. He was Luigne who everybody called Louie. The water beast made a move at him, but St. Columba made the sign of the cross. “Go no further. Do not touch Louie. Go back at once.” The water beast stopped like it had been “pulled back with ropes.” 

   Sally had to laugh about that. For one thing, she and her kind didn’t understand Scottish, or any other language. Besides that, nobody was ever going to get a rope on her. Lastly, if she had wanted to eat Louie, she would have, but he was wearing a gnarly hair shirt and smelled like a rotten eel.

   In 1938 Willian Fraser, the chief constable of Inverness-shire, tried to stop a hunting party that was after the sisters. They had a custom-made cedar wood harpoon gun and wanted them dead or alive. He tried to put a stop to it, but “my power to protect the monsters from the hunters was very doubtful”. He need not have been concerned. The Loch Ness girls would have made toothpicks out of their harpoon gun. 

   Twenty-four boats showed up in 1987. It was Operation Deep Scan. They deployed across the loch with echo sounding equipment. They thought they saw something. One of the scientists speculated they might be seals. Sally thought she wouldn’t mind using an echo sounder when shopping for dinner. Seals were her favorite food.

   Sonar expert Darrell Lowrance saw an enormous moving shadow six hundred feet down. “There’s something here that we don’t understand, and there’s something here that’s larger than a fish, maybe some species that hasn’t been detected before. I don’t know.” 

   “Just try to come down here and get me,” Sally snorted. She was in a bad mood. Deep Scan was scaring their dinner away.

   When her mind was made up and the time came to go, she started north up the loch at night, through the middle of Inverness where all the Scots were sleeping soundly in their beds, up Morway Firth into the North Sea, around John o Groats, and out into the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t long before the dawn was at her back and the New World was ahead.

   She swam around Newfoundland, up the St. Lawrence against the current, past Quebec City and Montreal, and from one end of Lake Ontario to the other. She sent tourists running for their lives at Niagara Falls and raced past Buffalo into Lake Erie. She stopped to catch her breath on the shores of Cleveland Ohio. That was a mistake.

   Police boats and Coast Guard boats, their lights flashing and sirens wailing ,raced towards her. Captains of speedboats big and small buzzed her back side, everybody taking pictures with their cell phones. One of the sailors lost his grip and his iPhone went flying. Sally flicked her tail and sent the phone back into the boat by air mail. She snapped her teeth at the Sea-Doo’s. They swerved away like water bugs. 

   A fire boat sprayed her with water “What is the point?” she wondered. “I’m always wet anyway.” She dove under the waves and found the deepest spot there was, two hundred feet down, and stopped to think. Should I stay or should I go?

   “This is worse than the Loch Ness,” she concluded. “I’m going back to the Old World tomorrow.”

   She backtracked the way she had come, past Fairport Harbor to North Perry, stopping near the Kissing Bridge at the Lake Erie Bluffs. It was getting dark. “I’ll get some shut eye here and shove off in the morning,” she thought. “Going over the Falls will jumpstart me across that last lake.”

   Sally found a shallow spot, stretched out, and lay her head down on a half-submerged boulder. She was asleep in minutes and slept like a log. Her eyelids twitched whenever she dreamt. All the fish avoided her. Those who bumped into her went home with scary stories to tell the tadpoles.

   Oliver got word about the monster in the morning from one of his Monster Hunter Irregulars, 4-and 5-year-old youngsters who kept their eyes and ears open for monster sightings. Then his friend Tommy One Shoe called him from the Metropark. He spoke in a whisper but was beyond excited.

   “Ollie, you got to get down here right away,” he said. “There is some kind of snake ten times bigger than Bullwinkle asleep here at the bluffs.”

   Oliver rolled his pedal power go kart out of the garage. He knew it wasn’t any old snake. He knew it was some kind of a whopper. Emma was hard on his heels.

   “What’s going on? Where are you going?” she asked. She was Oliver’s right-hand man.

   “No time to talk. Get your go kart and come with me. Bring your jackknife, too.”

   They stopped at a fish shack for some seal blubber. By the time they got to the bluffs, cars were turning around fast and going the other way. A police car pulled up, although the policeman looked like he wasn’t sure what to do. It was sunny and bright, but nobody was walking on the lakeside paths.

   Oliver and Emma ran past the policeman down to the waterline. When Emma saw the monster, she almost jumped out of her skin. Oliver stepped closer to get a better look.

   “She’s a big one,” he marveled.

   “Come on,” he said, a blob of blubber flip flopping on his shoulder. He ran towards an overturned rowboat. He and Emma dragged it into the water and rowed out to Sally. She was still sleeping, snoring like somebody’s uncle. The past day-and-a-half had worn her out.

   Some teenagers started shooting bottle rockets at her. Most of them missed. They were harmless, anyway. They were annoying, though. When the teens wouldn’t stop, Sally sucked up gallons of lake water and sprayed them with it. All their matches and bottle rockets turned to useless. They yelled at her, insulting her, but she didn’t know anymore English than she knew Scottish and didn’t pay them any mind. She turned towards the rowboat coming her way.

   “Now what?” she wondered.

   Oliver made signs with his hands that he wanted to tap a message out in Morse code. All monsters knew Morse code. Sally opened her mouth wide and Oliver tapped a message out with his ballpeen hammer, tapping on one of her front teeth. In the meantime, Emma started slicing the blob of seal blubber into slabs with her jackknife and tossing them down the serpent’s throat.

   “What a wonderful lassie,” Sally said to herself. “I thought I was going to die of hunger.”

   “OK,” Oliver tapped.  “I get where you’re coming from. You don’t want to stay here but you’re not sure you want to go back either. Have you thought about Lake Superior?”

   Sally said she had never heard of it just like she had never heard of Lake Erie.

   “It’s far away but being the terrific swimmer you are, you would get there in no time,” Oliver said. “It’s way up north where there aren’t too many people who will hassle you. It’s one of the biggest lakes in the world and it’s more than a thousand feet deep. If anybody does try to bother you, you can just go undercover for as long as you want. It’s cold, too, just like Scotland.”

   The more she heard the better she liked the idea. She didn’t like nosy neighbors or warm weather. She liked her alone time. “How do I get there?” she asked. 

   “Just turn around and go. It’s the last lake that way. You’ll know it when you get there.”

   Sally rubbed the top of Oliver’s head with her nose and swam away. Emma and Oliver rowed back to shore and were soon on their way home. That night Oliver asked his mother if they could have seal blubber for dinner.

   “I don’t think so honey,” she said. “I’ve got chicken in the oven.”

   “OK mom, maybe some other time,” Oliver said.

   “I love you mom,” Emma whispered to her mother, her stomach settling down after facing the prospect of eating seal blubber.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A stem-winder in the Maritimes.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVDP8B58

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. One rookie RCMP constable stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication