By Ed Staskus

   “What are you going to do with that?” Emma asked Oliver.

   “I’m going to shrink monsters with it from now on and take them away in my new paddy wagon,” Oliver said. “That way I won’t have to worry about what to do with them. Mom says Godzilla almost ate us out of house and home when he made all that trouble the last time and then slept over. When they are tiny I can feed them crumbs.”

   Emma looked at the toy police paddy wagon that was maybe big enough for a chipmunk. It was made of tin. It had red wheels and looked like it came from another century.  She burst out laughing.

   “What’s so funny?” Oliver asked.

   Oliver hunted monsters up and down Lake County. Emma was his older sister. They lived in Perry, Ohio with their parents. Both of them were taking piano lessons because their dad wanted them to. Both of them were well behaved most of the time because their mom said so. She had a severe strain to her that was not to be messed with. Both of them went to grade school Monday through Friday because the authorities of their town, the town of Perry, said so. Sometimes grown-ups were a bane to small fry.

   “You’re making some kind of ray gun that will shrink monsters? I don’t think so!”

   Since their mother wasn’t home at the moment, they got into a battle royal on the spot. They wrestled and fell off the sofa. They rolled back and forth on the carpet. Their cats, Sylvester and Son of Sylvester, wandered into the living room, took one look, and went the other way. They knew better than to get in the middle of a free-for-all between the two of them. The difference of opinion ended when they heard their mother pulling into the driveway. They were sitting quietly doing nothing when she walked in. She could tell she had interrupted something, but didn’t say anything other than, “Have you finished your homework?”

   Neither of them had even started. They trudged off to their bedrooms and put their noses to the grindstone. They were almost done by the time their mother called them downstairs for dinner. Their father was out of town on an inspection of an oil refinery in St. John’s, New Brunswick. He was an electrical engineer who specialized in oil refineries.

   “What are you going to do when cars don’t need gasoline anymore?” Oliver asked him one day.

   “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.” His father had a way of answering questions without answering them.

   “Are you going to go find that bridge in one of those Tesla’s like mean Mr. Efflux next door has got?”

   “He’s not a mean man, as long as you don’t unplug his car five minutes after he plugs it in.” 

   Mr. Efflux was a middleman. He prided himself on never being late to work. He wasn’t happy the morning his car ran out of juice four miles from home, stuck on the side of the road with no outlet in sight.

   Three days later it was early Saturday morning. Oliver’s father had gotten home late on Friday night and was sleeping in. Oliver’s mother was visiting their grandmother and helping her rake up the dregs of last fall’s leaves. Oliver was at the work table his father had set up for him in a corner of the garage. Emma walked in shaking the sandman out of her eyes.

   “What are you doing now?” she asked.

   “Wouldn’t you like to know, smarty pants!”

   When the spat was over, and they were catching their breath leaning on the work table, 

after they had put everything back where it belonged, Oliver showed Emma the ray gun he was working on.

   “That’s just one of your old squirt guns,” she said.

   “That’s what I want it to look like,” Oliver said.

   “How does it work?”

   “Oh, that’s easy, you just point it at whatever you want to shrink and pull the trigger.”

   “No, silly, how does it really work?”

   “Do you mean, how does it work or how does it really work?”

   Oliver and Emma went around in circles for a few minutes until they finally circled back to the red squirt gun that was going to be a ray gun soon. It didn’t look like much and Emma said so with a sniff. Oliver fiddled with it while Emma watched. He tightened a couple of screws, adjusted the sighting, and wiped off some spit that had landed on it during their scuffle.

   “Are you going to shrink all the monsters?”

   “No, only the ones who won’t listen to reason. The rest can go their own way.”

   “Whose reason?”

   “My reason.”

   “Where are you going to put the ones you shrink, after you have got them in your paddy wagon?”

   “I am going to build a small jail. I might build a small halfway house, too.”

   Oliver and Emma worked on the ray gun all morning. They thought they finally had it ready to go when noon rolled around. Their mother had come home and called them to lunch. The cats drifted out to the garage to see what they had been doing. Oliver and Emma shooed them away after they finished their seed butter cracker sandwiches and were back in the garage. They were ready to test the ray gun.

   “What are we going to shrink?” Emma asked.

   They looked around. There were no monsters anywhere. They walked up and down their neighborhood, as far as the Perry Cemetery, and down to the Grand River. It was a cool sunny day, crisp as a spring day could be. Tommy One Shoe joined them on their way home.

   “What are you working on?” he asked, stepping up to the work bench and eyeballing the red plastic squirt gun.

   “It’s a ray gun. It shrinks monsters down to size.”

   “I want dibs on it so I can cut my older sisters down to size,” Tommy said.

   “We have to test it first,” Oliver said.

   “Make sure you don’t point that thing at me.” Tommy didn’t want to be that day’s crash test dummy.

   “It might be better to test it on a thing rather than on a somebody,” Emma said. She was Oliver’s voice of good sense.

   “That’s probably a good idea,” Oliver admitted. “What can we test it on?”

   They stepped onto the apron of the driveway next door to their house. What they saw was Mr. Efflux’s Tesla in the driveway. The three children circled it. They agreed shrinking a neighbor’s house was out of the question. The neighbor might be inside it. The car seemed to be their best bet. Oliver unraveled an extension cord and plugged the ray gun in. He flipped the switch on, aimed, and pulled the trigger. There was a crackling hum like electricity on fire. The Tesla quivered and glowed and in a second shrank to the size of a matchbox car.

   “It works!” Oliver exclaimed. He ran and got his police paddy wagon. He slid the Tesla inside it. The little car fit perfectly. Oliver was beside himself. He and Tommy exchanged high fives.

   “We better get it back to what it was before Mr. Efflux sees what we’ve done,” Emma said.

   Oliver licked his lips. “I haven’t exactly thought that part through. I don’t know how to change it back, at least not yet.”

   “Oh, oh,” Tommy said and immediately went home.

   “What are we going to do?” Emma asked.

   Oliver rummaged around his tool box and found a 9 volt battery. He connected it to the little Tesla. Mr. Efflux wouldn’t be able to get inside the car, of course, but it would at least still run. Oliver put it back in Mr. Efflux’s driveway. A baby worm crawled underneath it to catch some shade.

   “Small miracles are better than nothing,” Oliver said as he and Emma ran back inside their house and locked the door before Mr. Efflux had to go somewhere in his car.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.