By Ed Staskus

   Oliver didn’t like time traveling. He didn’t mind the travel part but didn’t like the time part. It took forever to push the time machine out of the garage, pull off and fold up the heavy waterproof cover, lube the gearbox, check the oil, and gas it up. It was bad on gas on top of everything else. He had to push hundreds of buttons and levers and switches to get it ready to blast off. Then there was the count down. Unlike NASA space ships, which took off after a ten count, the time machine required a one thousand count, counting backwards.

   God forbid he lose count, which happened once, and he had to go all the way back to the beginning. When he did he forgot when and where he was going, fumbled around with his memory, and finally gave up the project when his bedtime drew near. Since then he hadn’t gone time traveling. But the Jim Stubbs mash-up was too big to ignore. It was time to suit up again.

   The time machine was both simple and complex. When it was time to go Oliver fastened his seat belt, dialed up the target date, sometime in the past or the future, and pushed a big red button that said “GO.” He watched and waited while time rewound or fast forwarded. It never took long to get to the target time and place unless it was many centuries away. When he got there he sprayed the time machine with invisibility spray and marked the coordinates with a sextant. The worst thing that could happen would be to not be able to find it again.

   It would have been easier to use a cell phone with GPS, but his mother wouldn’t let him or his sister Emma, who was his right-hand man, have one even though he was already eight years old and his sister was ten years old. Their mother was conservative and believed in family values. All the things the family had, like their cars and computers, were new as could be. The woman of the house, however, stayed in her believe-you-me ways when it came to beliefs.

   “Mom,” Emma asked, “why do we have to take old stuff for granted?”

   “First of all, it’s not old stuff, and second, you’re too young to understand.”

   “I will never be old enough to understand,” Emma groused.

   Her mother ordered Emma to go to her room. She pulled out her cell phone. It was almost as big as an iPad. “You go to your room for an hour, young lady,” she said. “I’m timing it.”

   In her room Emma flopped on her back on her bed. She raised an arm and pointed at a corner. “And in this corner, still undefeated, my mom and her long-held beliefs,” she said but not so loud that her mother could hear her.

   Oliver and Emma were the Monster Hunters of Lake County. They lived in Perry, about 30 miles east of Cleveland, Ohio along the south shore of Lake Erie. He was the best monster hunter in the county, if not the whole state, even though he was the youngest. He had a sixth sense about it. Most of the others didn’t have any sense about them. Most of them were booski’s who were forever getting lost in the weeds.

   He landed his time machine in Boston near William Mumler’s Photography Studio. The spirit photographer was a big hit in his part of the world, especially since he had been arrested for fraud in New York City a year before. He took pictures of people, photographs that included, when they were developed, images of their deceased loved ones. Not everybody believed in the pictures. P. T Barnum, circus man and self-appointed expert on suckers, testified at the trial that it was all hokum. 

   “It’s all a sham,” he said. But the jury couldn’t make up its mind. It became a mistrial. William Mumler went back to Bean Town a free man.

   William Mumler charged a dollar for a portrait. He charged ten dollars for a portrait when it included a spirit. When Emma did the math later ten dollars came out to more than two hundred dollars in today’s money. When she asked her mother if capitalism was a family value, she had to spend another hour in her room and pay her mother a dollar for bothering her.

   “We believe in family values in this family, do you understand me, young lady?”

   “Yes, mom,” Emma said and crept away.

   William Mumler displayed a photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln. He took it in 1870. It astonished everybody. A translucent image of Abraham Lincoln, her husband, was in the picture sitting beside her on the sofa. The picture was taken five years after Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. “He looks so alive,” everybody said. Nobody thought it was a trick. Only the photographer knew it was a trick. He didn’t tell anybody, least of all himself.

   “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” Honest Abe had once said. He spent most of his days when the 21^st century rolled around rolling over in his grave. Years of day-to-day lies on Fox News, Twitter, and Facebook had worn him out. “If I ever come back I am coming back as Dishonest Abe and fight fire with fire, especially with that Donald the Borgia.”

   The spirit photographer had sent an SOS about Jim Stubbs by telegraph to every ghostbuster he knew or had ever heard about. Oliver wasn’t exactly a ghostbuster and was living a century and a half later, but he somehow got wind of the SOS. He didn’t know how to reply since telegraphs were long gone but he wanted to help, even though the time machine was a pain in the butt. Landing it in the Back Bay had been a struggle. It was 1871 when Oliver appeared out of the blue in Boston.

   “The Jim Stubbs photograph I made is a phony, but Jim Stubbs, even though he is no longer real, has become real again,” William Mumler’s telegraph read. “He has come back and won’t leave. He is scaring the life out of everybody. Please come and help.”

   Oliver walked into the photographer’s lobby like a duck out of water. A police officer on the beat looked him over. The boy looked queer to him. The police officer was an older man and  carried a standard issue six-foot pole painted blue and white. It was what he used to protect himself. He had a rattle to call for help in case things got out of hand. Boston was bustling with the high and low. Landfills and annexations of neighboring villages had grown the city from one square mile to forty square miles. Shoe and textile factories were around every corner. Maritime commerce out of the ports sailed worldwide. Everybody was taking in boarders in the North End and on Fort Hill as immigrants poured into the city.

   William Mumler had gotten many offers of help, but none from a boy who walked, talked, and dressed like he was from a different world. “Who are you,” he asked, scratching his beard. He would have scratched his head except he was nearly bald.

   “My name is Oliver,” Oliver said. “I’m a monster hunter, although I go after spirits and creatures, too.”

   “What do you do when you find them?”

   “I tell them to go away.”

  “What if they refuse to go.”

   “I have my own way of getting results.”

   “You’re not from Boston, are you?”

   “No.”

   “Do you mind if I take your picture?”

   “No, I don’t mind.”

   The first photographic portrait studio ever in the United States opened in Boston. Oliver sat for his picture. He had to sit still for five minutes for the taking of it, which was on a glass plate. The photographer took it into a back room to develop. When he came back he was scratching his beard again.

   “I don’t know what happened, but everything is in the picture except you.”

   He tried again. When he came back again he showed Oliver the second photograph. The background was in the picture. The chair Oliver had sat in was there. What wasn’t there was Oliver.

   “Are you a spirit of some kind?”

   “No, but I came here in a time machine from 2023. Maybe that’s why the camera can’t see me.”

   “The year 2023 in the future?”

   “Yes.”

   Oliver could tell the spirit photographer had a million questions. He wasn’t ready and willing to answer a million questions. “What is your Jim Stubbs problem, exactly?” he asked.

   “My problem, young man from the future, is that I resurrected Jim Stubbs, and now the villain won’t go back to where he belongs.”

Next: Searching for Jim Stubbs.

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.

By Ed Staskus

   “Don’t you get scared fighting all those monsters?” Tommy One Shoe asked Oliver, who was chewing on a blade of grass. It tasted like somebody’s bare foot. He spit it out.

   Whenever there was monster trouble, and somebody asked who they should call for help, Oliver was at the top of the Help Wanted list. Tommy was one of his best friends. Emma and Dorothy were with them. Emma was Oliver’s older sister and right-hand man. Dorothy was Tommy’s next-door best friend. They all went to the same school, Perry Elementary, except they didn’t go to school in the summertime.

   It was the morning of the Fourth of July. The day had been a federal holiday since 1941, but the tradition of Independence Day went back to the 18th century and the American Revolution. The Continental Congress voted for independence 246 years ago and two days later rolled out the red carpet for the Declaration of Independence. Since then, there had been parades, concerts, and fireworks galore to celebrate the big day. 

   Oliver mulled over Tommy’s question. “If I thought about it too much you bet I would be scared,” he said. “I leave the thinking to Emma. Most of the time there’s too much going on to be scared, anyway. The best thing to do is go into action. If you stand around too long your worst fears can come true any second.”

   “I’m more scared of shots than I am of Dracula,” Tommy said. “I’m even more scared in the doctor’s office. They make you wait forever for the shot.”

   They were at Indian Point Park, just minutes from where they lived. Oliver and Emma lived in the Canterbury Crossing Condominiums while Tommy and Dorothy lived in the Pebble Creek Crossing Condominiums, They had walked to the park. It was a warm sunny day. They were where the Grand River and Paine Creek bumped into each other. There was a totem stone nearby. The names of boys who went to Charles Lyman’s military camp there a hundred years earlier were carved into the stone. The encampment back then was called Camp Wissolohichan. Nobody knew how to pronounce it.

   “I love your name,” Emma said to Dorothy.

   “I hate it,” Dorothy said. “My mom saw some old movie about a little girl who fought witches and flying monkeys. The girls name was Dorothy. My mom said she was the bravest girl in the world and so she named me after her.”

   “Do you have a nickname,” Emma asked. “I could call you that.”

   “No, but you can call me Dottie, which is what everybody else calls me.”

   “I have an uncle who changed his name when he was nine years old.”

   “I never heard of anybody nine years old being allowed to do that,” Dottie said.

   “He did and he made it stick,” Emma said. “His name was Harold. Everybody called him Hal. One day he told everybody they had to start calling him by his new name if they wanted to stay friends with him.When they asked he told them he had changed his name to Magnus. After that everybody called him Mags. He didn’t like it when he found out Mags was a girl’s name. He changed it again to William. Everybody called him Billy after that.”

   “My mom would kill me if I tried to change my name,” Dottie said. Emma nodded solemnly in agreement. She knew full well how serious adults could be, especially her mother.

   “What if a monster tried to kill you?” Tommy asked Oliver.

   “I would tell them it’s not allowed,” Oliver said. “They can try to run away, but no killing.”

   “What if they don’t listen?”

   “I have my ways of making them listen. If they don’t, I destroy them. If I have to, I destroy them twice. After I do that they never come back.”

   “What are you doing later on?” Tommy asked.

   “We’re having a barbeque,” Oliver said. Americans eat almost two hundred million hot dogs every Fourth of July. “My dad is doing burgers and dogs.” Their mother didn’t cook anything unless it was a pasta salad. “You and Dottie are both coming over, don’t you remember?”

   “Oh yeah, sure,” Tommy said, racking his memory. He was called One Shoe because he forgot his second shoe one morning on the way to school and spent the rest of the day limping around in the other shoe, dragging his bare sock behind him, wearing a hole out in it.

   “Did you know that some of the soldiers who were in the Revolutionary War didn’t have shoes, not even one shoe, and they wore rags for socks?” Oliver asked Tommy.

   “What do you mean? How could that be?” It still got on Tommy’s nerves whenever anybody even hinted at his one shoe false step. “How do you know that?”

   “Our teacher told us all about it, about how some of the soldiers froze at Valley Forge and how their toes fell off.”

   “My dad says we are free because of Valley Forge,” Tommy said. “He calls it the War of Independence. He was in Afghanistan when he was in the army before I was born. He says it was awful, but it was something that had to be done.”

   “Does he say why?”

   “No, he never talks about why. I asked him if he was scared. He said yes, but the other side of fear is freedom, which is the side we want to be on, whatever that means.”

   Oliver and Tommy thought about what it might mean but gave up. They eye-balled a river otter swimming past them. The spring thaw had resulted in flooding but there hadn’t been any heavy rain since mid-May. The water was like a quiet country road. The otter took its time. They took their time watching it.

   “We otter get going,” Oliver joked.

   “Are your relatives going to be at the barbeque?” Tommy asked as they walked up a trail to the bluffs overlooking the Grand River.

   “Yeah,” Oliver said.

   “Oh, man, does that mean we have to do crafts?” Tommy asked. Oliver’s relatives always brought scissors and glue. Everybody who was a child had to join in. He wasn’t an arts and crafts boy. He liked to eat, though.

   Oliver and Emma’s relatives coming to their Fourth of July barbeque were from their mother’s side. They lived nearby. There were two sisters and their husbands. One of the husbands drove a Jeep and repaired car washes. The other man drove a RAM pick-up and was the silent type. He usually had his face in his cellphone. Both men were conservative family men. There were four grown-up children, all girls, all in their early 20s. All of the young women had a lazy Susan of boyfriends.

   After they watched house flies getting dizzy at the sight of the barbeque buffet, then eating their fill when their turn came, and later throwing a Frisbee back and forth for an hour, afterwards taking a quick nap, when the long day finally settled into dusk Oliver, Emma, Tommy, and Dottie walked to the Madison Avenue Estates. Their friend Jimmy lived there and had a box of bottle rockets ready to go.

   “It’s like an exploding Christmas,” Dottie said, watching the rockets’ red glare in the night sky.

    “Independence Day is the best day ever,” Emma said.

     “You bet it is,” Tommy One Shoe said. “Today is the day Will Smith saved us from the aliens.”

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.

By Ed Staskus

   When Oliver’s neighbors started seeing the ghost of the Godfather, the one and only, roaming the streets of Canterbury Crossing at night, Oliver assumed they had been watching too many reruns of the gangster saga. But when a pack of them trooped into his family’s living room and asked to see him about the sightings, asking him to make their streets safe again, it was an offer he could not refuse.

   Oliver was the Monster Hunter of Lake County. He had been hunting them for more than two years, ever since he turned six. At first, he went at it alone, but his sister Emma quickly became his right-hand man. She wasn’t as brave as him, but she was smarter.

   “Always be smarter than the people who hire you,” she told Oliver.

   “But nobody hires us,” Oliver said. “We’re volunteers.”

   “You know what I mean,” she said. 

   “What about bravery?” he asked.

   “There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity.”

   Oliver knew when not to argue with Emma. He wanted to say stupidity was the fashion of the day but that bravery never went out of style. He wanted to say something along those lines but didn’t. He knew it was bravery that always paid off, but he was going to wait for another day to say so. After the neighbors had voiced their concerns about the Godfather, about how the spirit was scaring dogs and children, dragging chains behind it that kept everybody awake at night, Oliver agreed to help.

   “I can’t make any promises,” he said. They were not put off. They had seen him in action before. They had seen him save the Perry Nuclear Power Plant when Goo Goo Godzilla attacked it. “Just make it go someplace else, anyplace other than our backyards,” they said.

   That night, when everybody’s TV’s were off, the children tucked in and the adults snoring their heads off, Oliver and Emma snuck out of the house. They slipped through the sliding back door so that nothing would slam shut in their faces. It was as dark as drawing a blank. Oliver flipped on the flashlight he had brought and cast its beam far and wide. The Godfather was nowhere in sight.

   Emma didn’t like looking for the Black Hand when she couldn’t even see the back of her hand, and said so when Oliver swung his flashlight in her direction.

   “What’s the Black Hand?” Oliver asked. 

   “That’s the gangsters, the mob,” Emma said. ”At least, that’s what everybody used to call it, before calling it the Mafia.”

   The Black Hand went back more than two hundred years when some Sicilian immigrants learned to write English and started sending extortion letters to anybody in San Francisco, New Orleans, New York City, and everywhere else, who they thought would pay up. They threatened arson and murder. They signed their letters with pictures of a black hand and a dagger. If they thought you needed extra convincing, the dagger was drawn dripping with blood.

   “How do you know all that?” Oliver asked. 

   “I read it in a book,” Emma said. She read books morning noon and night, scores of them. Oliver was like his father. He never read books unless he absolutely had to. Some of Emma’s books, like the one about the Mafia she had gotten from the Perry Public Library, her parents didn’t know anything about. She kept them well hidden. She was a sassy pre-teen. Her mom had forbidden her to read certain books. She had been a corporate lawyer and knew all books except law books were full of lies. When Emma explained they were living in Ohio, not Florida, her mom gave her a sharp look. She thought libraries in Florida were on the right track banning books and wanted to move to the Sunshine State.

   “I don’t want to go back there,” Emma said. “It was a hundred degrees every day the week we went to Disney World and the sewers smelled bad.”

   “They smell bad because so many politicians live in Florida,” Oliver said. “When they move to a swamp they think they’ve come up in the world. They’re after happy money, the kind that makes only them happy and other people unhappy. They wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape unless there was something in it for them.”

  Just then the Godfather unfurled like a snake from behind a utility pole.  Emma reached into her back pocket and pulled out the jackknife she always kept handy. The Godfather looked at it and snorted.

   “What are you worried about?” he said. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.”

   “Oh,” she said. “I guess you’re right Mr. Godfather.”

   “You can call me Vito,” he said. 

   “I thought you were Marlon Brando.”

   “Don’t talk about any stinking actors to my face,” he snapped. “If you do you will sink with the fishes.”

   “I thought it was swim with the fishes.”

   “In my world, bambino, it is sink like cement, fish or no fish”

   “Didn’t you like the movies about you?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like them,” the Godfather said. ”I liked them well enough but I’m not going to say I want to cuddle up and kiss them. That Marlon Brando, I will tell you, I would slap his face into hamburger meat if he was still around.”

   “What are you doing in our neighborhood?” Oliver interrupted.

   “I’m trying to find out where we went wrong,” the Godfather said. “We used to make big money from the protection rackets, extortion, booze, drugs, gambling, and girls. When I heard it was all gone I couldn’t believe it. I came back, went to the top cities, Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and then the small fry, and I finally landed here, which is just about as nowhere as it gets.” 

   Oliver and Emma exchanged looks. What did he know about Perry? What a blowhard! He was as bad as a Florida politician.

   “What did you find out?” Oliver asked.

   “I found out nobody pays protection money to nobody anymore. Extortion is a lost cause. Booze, drugs, and gambling have all become legal, and free sex killed the girlie trade. There’s never a dame around when you hit the skids.”

   “When are you leaving?” Oliver interrupted again. The night was getting cold as witch’s toes. He was getting tired of the Godfather explaining and complaining. He wasn’t the Complaint Desk of Lake County. He didn’t care about crocodile tears from any washed-up crime lord. He didn’t care if it was Marlon Brando or Vito Corleone. Whatever his name was he had to go before he got up to any more shenanigans.

   “I don’t know that I will be leaving,” the Godfather said. He was starting to look prim and proper, like he might even pay his property taxes. “Where I live now makes me hot under the collar. I saw a nice cemetery down the road. There were lots of trees to keep me cool. I might move there.” The cemetery was the Perry Cemetery, less than a mile away. Some of the earliest settlers from the early 1800s were buried there, like the farmer Ezra Beebe.

   When Ezra Beebe heard the Godfather say he might move in, he got busy and dug himself out of his grave. He marched down S. Ridge Rd. to the Canterbury Crossings Condominiums. He took a right at the entrance and stopped where Oliver, Emma, and the Godfather were. He ignored Oliver and Emma. He marched up to the Godfather. He had a three-pound bag of salt with him. He poured it out at the Godfather’s feet, making a circle. When the gangster tried to step over the circle of salt, he found out he couldn’t. He was trapped inside the roundness. Ezra tossed handfuls of sage on the ground and set it on fire. It didn’t smell bad, except to the Godfather, who started wheezing and coughing.

   “I am cleansing this neighborhood,” Ezra said. “All evil spirits must leave.” No sooner did he say what he had to say than he turned his back on the Godfather, crossing his arms over his chest, looking into the distance. He didn’t look fearful or angry. He had been dead a long time and knew the score. He waited for the show to start.

   An oily plume of smoke seeped up from a sewer grate at the Godfather’s feet. Before long he was engulfed by the smoke. When the air cleared, the Godfather was gone.

   “He ain’t coming back any time soon,“ Ezra said, leaving as quietly as he had come.

   “Thank goodness he showed up,” Emma exclaimed. “I don’t know what we could have done if he hadn’t.”

   Oliver pointed to the packages of salt and sage he had brought with him. “I would have thought of something,” he said.

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.”

Help support these stories. $25.00 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com with “Contribution” in the subject line. Payments processed by Stripe.

“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

By Ed Staskus

   The Saturday afternoon the Cleveland Guardians made short work of the New York Yankees at Progressive Field was the afternoon Oliver’s father took him and his sister Emma to Grays Armory after the game was over. The baseball stadium was on East 9^th St. The Lake Erie Cemetery, where nearly 8,000 early settlers were buried, was across the street. On the other side of the boneyard, where Bolivar Rd. and Prospect Ave. meet before ending up at East 14^th St., was Grays Armory.

   They were a half hour west of their home, downtown in neighboring Cuyahoga County, and Oliver was technically off-duty. His father, however, had promised a friend to bring his son to the armory to see if he could do something about Lou the Caretaker, the only ghost still hanging around.

   The Cleveland Grays got started when the Canadian Rebellions of 1837 got into full swing. The city fathers acted, forming a volunteer military company, to protect themselves from Canucks on the loose. They weren’t called the Grays at first. They were called the Cleveland City Guards but since their uniforms were gray they changed the name the next year. They wore Queen’s Guard bearskin hats that made them look a foot taller than they really were. They adopted “Semper Paratus” as their motto. Nobody knew what it meant because it was in Latin. The man upstairs finally explained it meant “Always Prepared.” Everybody liked that. There were 65 of the Grays.

   They set up shop on the fourth floor of a building called the Mechanics Block. Thirty years later they needed more space. They moved into an old fire station. Ten years later they moved into the newly built City Armory, sharing it with the Ohio National Guard. Soon after that a fire burnt the building to the ground. They decided to build their own place that would stand the test of time. 

   A seven thousand pound block of sandstone was set in place in 1893 for the foundation of Grays Armory. It grew to be three stories high with a five-story tower on the northeast corner. It was built as an urban fortress. There is a black iron drop-gate and iron barriers in front of the solid oak front doors. Iron rods are bolted to the brick walls as window protectors. 

   The armory was built to store guns and ammo. The drill room was where the Grays marched up and down in tight formations. But it wasn’t long before it became a kind of community center. The Cleveland Orchestra’s first concert in 1918 was staged there. The first time the Metropolitan Opera came to town they sang songs of doomed love and hellfire there. The first home and garden show and the first auto show in Cleveland were held there.

   Oliver looked the building up and down. It was Romanesque, built of brick and sandstone. It wasn’t an armory anymore, but a museum preserving local military heritage. Nobody drilled in the drill room. It had been converted into a ballroom. When boys and girls got married they sometimes had their wedding receptions in the hall.

   “That’s the problem,” Oliver’s father explained. “The wedding receptions help keep the building afloat, but Lou is always shouting something or other and slamming doors, not to mention crawling under the tables. It freaks people out. One bridesmaid got very upset when she felt a hand on her ankle.”

   “Dad, did you say he’s the only ghost here?”

   “Yes, all the others have long since gone. He’s the last ghost standing.”

   “Why didn’t he leave with the others when they left?” Oliver asked.

   “Nobody knows, although I think it’s because he was the man who kept the armory spic and span for many years. He’s been here a long time. He doesn’t like it when it gets messy. When it does he gets right to work, which is a big help to the maintenance man. He and Lou get along just fine.”

   Lou had been the caretaker at the armory from its earliest days, living on the top floor of the turret tower. He never married. He liked to read private eye page-turners and drink beer at night, stretched out on his sofa. He dropped dead of a heart attack in the meeting room on the ground floor of the turret tower. After he was buried he snuck out of the graveyard, went back to Grays Armory, and had not left since then.

   “Lou is always walking through closed doors. Museum visitors can hear his footsteps but none of the motion sensors ever pick him up. Whenever anybody starts talking about him the flags in the ballroom start falling off the walls. One night in the middle of the night an alarm went off. When the police got here they didn’t see a thing. When they checked the security camera footage they saw what looked like fluorescent mist in the room that the alarm went off in. Everybody knew it was Lou.”

   “What did the police do?” Oliver asked.

   “They said, case closed, and went away.”

   “Do you want me to get him to go away and not come back?”

   “Yes.”

   “But it’s his home.”

   “When your day is done, son, you can’t go home again.”

   “Didn’t your friend say Lou drank apple cider vinegar for his health every day?” Oliver asked.

   “Yes, every morning. He drank beer at night.”

   “All right, then. I need a bottle of apple cider vinegar. And, even though I don’t know if we’ll need it, get a bottle of beer, too, just in case.”

   Oliver’s father walked to the Heinen’s Supermarket on East 9^th St. and bought a bottle of Bragg’s apple cider vinegar and a bottle of Broken Skull IPA. He was back in 20 minutes. He and Oliver stepped inside the meeting room on the ground floor of the turret tower. Oliver poured a glass of the vinegar and set it on a side table. A big potted plant in the room began to shake. Lou the Caretaker walked in. He walked to the glass of apple cider vinegar and took a sip. When he saw the bottle of beer he took a long pull on it.

   “That hit the spot, believe you me,” he said.

   “I’m glad it did Mr. Lou, but now we’ve got to talk about your new home.”

   “What new home? I’m happy here.”

   “I have got to ask you to leave,” Oliver said.

   “But why?”

   “You scare the daylights out of living people, for one thing. Another thing, your time is done here. It would be best if you joined the other ghosts who used to be here. It’s best to be among your own kind. They probably miss you. This will just take a minute, but I have to recite something official.”

   Oliver stood back and concentrated.

   “By the power of all my good karma, direct connection to the source, agape love, and selfless acts, I ask the universe to please remove all spooky entities from this place,” he said in a baseball announcer’s tone of voice. “You are not welcome here, so please go to where you are welcome. Over and out and batter up.”

   “If you’re going to put it that way, all right then,” Lou said.

   Oliver’s father walked Lou to the supermarket. He bought two more bottles of apple cider vinegar and a six-pack of beer. Outside, he handed them to Lou. When he did Lou became invisible with a poof, even though he was still there. The shopping bag of vinegar and beer floated hip high across Euclid Ave and down East 9^th St. towards Lake Erie. Every single person who saw the doubled-up blue plastic bag going past on its own nearly jumped out of their skins. The only person who didn’t was a policeman who stopped traffic at St. Clair Ave. so the bag could go by in safety. He had seen more unexplained bumps in the night than he cared to remember.

   It wasn’t long before the bag was a speck in the distance. Oliver’s dad turned back towards Grays Armory. Oliver and Emma were sitting on the front steps. Dusk was going dark. He flashed a thumb’s up while taking the stairs and joining his children.

   “Where’s Lou?” Oliver asked.

   “Looking for a dead-end street,” his father said.

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.”

Help support these stories. $25.00 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com with “Contribution” in the subject line. Payments processed by Stripe.

“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

By Ed Staskus

   The Wall of Voodoo was a plywood wall littered with dolls. There were nearly a hundred of them in a garage behind a brick house on Vrooman Rd. a mile north of I-90. The dolls had pins stuck in them. The pins didn’t bother the dolls, although they bothered the people who the dolls represented. If they didn’t have aches and pains already, they had them for sure once a pin cushion of them went up on the Wall of Voodoo.

   Voodoo is a religion that came out of West African ancestor worship and is practiced mostly in Haiti and parts of the American south, especially Louisiana. It is about serving spirits. Prayers and rituals honor the spirits and ask for their blessings. Voodoo enthusiasts chant, dance, and go into trances. Papa Gede is the number one spirit. He is a skeleton who wears a top hat and carries a cane down Resurrection Road. Voodoo dolls are almost always good, meant to bring good fortune to the person they represent. Friends and relatives pin flowers and photographs on the doll to appeal to the spirits.

   Sometimes bad people make voodoo dolls do things they don’t want to do. Those bad people ask the devil to give them black magic to get their revenge on somebody. No matter how much the dolls protest, once they are on the Wall of Voodoo they have to do the bidding of the evildoers who put them there.

   Hardly anybody in the town of Perry knew anything about voodoo. What they knew was lots of their neighbors were suffering from unexplained ailments. One newcomer in town was a man relocated from Louisiana. He knew an incantation that could bring Papa Gede to life for a minute. When the spirit appeared, the man asked him one question.

   “Is anybody in these parts messing around with voodoo dolls?” he asked Papa Gede.

   “Yes,” the spirit said, and disappeared in a puff of smoke. He didn’t like the weather north of Mason-Dixon. He sped back to the bayou.

    Lake County is a conservative northeastern Ohio county, more conservative than most of the state and more conservative than the rest of the country. Everybody had new cell phones, new flat screen TV’s, and new $50 grand pick-up trucks with gizmos galore, but they didn’t like anything new. They didn’t like the emerging culture. They especially didn’t like any new religions. If the religion had something to do with Africa, they liked it even less. 

   They thought of themselves as can-do people but didn’t know what to do about voodoo dolls spreading misery in their corner of the world. They were at their wit’s end when a local gossip piped up, “I heard there’s a boy who lives in one of the developments near Perry Cemetery who everybody says is a monster hunter. Maybe he could help.”

   Oliver was the Unofficial Monster Hunter  of Lake County. He saved the Perry Nuclear Power Plant when Goo Goo Godzilla attacked it. He saved Lake Erie College in Painesville from Old Joe Croaker. He knew how to deal with ghosts and trolls.  He was just over eight years old. His sister Emma was his right-hand man. She was just under eleven years old.

   “Okey doke,” Oliver said when a delegation of Perry men and women asked him for his help.

   “What are you going to do?” Emma asked him when they were alone.

   “Everybody in a sick way seems to live near here,” Oliver said. “Whatever is making it happen must be close by. I’ll get my Bad-Oh-Meter and we’ll go looking for it.”

   “Alone?”

   “No, you’ll be with me,” Oliver said.

   Emma stuck her trusty jackknife into her back pocket. Oliver turned in a slow circle. His Bad-Oh-Meter was a Y-shaped forked stick. It looked like a dowsing rod. He and Emma followed its lead when it started to twitch. They cut through the Church of Jesus Christ’s weedy field, walked up S. Ridge Rd. to Vrooman Rd., walked across the bridge spanning the Grand River, and soon came to a brick house where the Bad-Oh-Meter started twitching like a madman. 

   There were two giganto vinyl banners on the front lawn. One was turned slightly to face traffic coming on one direction. The other one was turned slightly the other way. One said, “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Trump.” The other one said, “Trump 2024 Make Votes Count Again.” The banners were blue, the lettering was white, and the trim was red.

   “I thought he was a traitor, not a red, white, and blue patriot,” Emma said.

   “Don’t let grandpa hear you say that,” Oliver said. “His head would explode.”

   When they walked up the driveway the Bad-Oh-Meter twitched to behind the house towards the garage.

   “Whatever it is, it is in there,” Oliver said.

   What they found was the Wall of Voodoo. The voodoo dolls were slapdash on the wall. Each one of them had lots of pins stuck in it. Each one also had a name written on a scrap of paper. One of the names was Harry Culver, who lived in their development and had recently been complaining about his suddenly achy knees. There were pins stuck in his doll’s knees. Below his name was written “DEMOCRAT PANSY.” The same words were written below each one of the names.

   “What’s a pansy?” Oliver asked.

   “Beats me,” Emma said, stumped.

   Oliver and Emma took the dolls off the wall, took all the pins out of the dolls, removed the scraps of paper, and threw everything in a pile outside the garage. They found a can of gasoline and poured it on the pile, setting it on fire with kitchen matches Oliver always carried in his Monster Hunting Field Kit. They went back to the garage to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. When they did they saw a half-scale mannequin of Donald Trump, wearing a red baseball cap and smirking.

   “I thought he was bigger,” Oliver said.

   “I thought he was smaller,” Emma said, and just for fun jabbed the tip of her jackknife into the mannequin’s big toe.

   At Mar-a-Lago Donald Trump was on his way from the dinner table to the bathroom. He felt a sharp pain in his big toe. He couldn’t walk. He stopped and sat down. He called for help.

    “We should stick a pin in his tongue since he’s such a blabbermouth,” Oliver said. Both of them thought it was a good idea.

   “What’s wrong with the boss?” asked one of Donald Trump’s flunkies.

   The bossman wanted to say what was wrong but when he tried to talk he felt a stabbing pain in his tongue and couldn’t say a word. He pointed to his big toe and his tongue, grunting and squirming. His flunkies couldn’t make heads nor tails of what he was trying to say. “Maybe he could tell us on Twitter,” one of them suggested. When they looked, they couldn’t find his solid gold cell phone. He had left it on the dinner table, where his children stole it and sold it on eBay. The flunkies dragged him to his bedroom and laid him out on his king size bed.

   Oliver and Emma were tending to the fire when a billy goat came running out of the house. He was wearing body armor and waving an AR-15. “What the hell are you doing?” he squawked and raised his gun. All of a sudden Papa Gede appeared. Smoke was pouring out of his ears. His bones were radiating. He was mad as the dickens. He didn’t like his voodoo being used for evil purposes.

   “Get away from those children,” he roared and struck the man on the side of the head with his cane. The man went down like a lightweight and started crying and complaining. He swore he would sue Papa Gede for all he was worth. “When my lawyers get done with you, you will be mashed potatoes,” he foamed at the mouth. 

   Papa Gede had heard enough. He snapped the AR-15 in half over his knee and threw it to the side. He spit on the fire. The flames got red-hot higher. He picked the man up, tossed him over his shoulder, and carried him to the house.

   “If you go inside and behave yourself, I will forgive and forget,” Papa Gede said.

   Machine Gun Kelly ran to his front door, tripped over the threshold, and crawled inside. He broke his fall with his fingernails. He got on the horn to 911. “Help, there’s a monster here, hurry, send the SWAT team!”

   “A fat lot of good that’s going to do him,” Papa Gede said laughing bananas in the split second before disappearing.

   “Thanks, pops!” Oliver called after him.

   Emma and he went back to the fire, dumped a bucket of water on it, and scattered the ashes. There was nothing left of the voodoo dolls. Walking back home, when they got to the bridge over the Grand River, they stopped and looked down. It had gotten dark and a full moon was reflected in the still water. A breeze rippled the water and made the moon look like it had wrinkles.

   “It’s rotten old goats like that one,” Emma said, gesturing over her shoulder, “who give witch doctors a bad name.”

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.

By Ed Staskus

   “When you heard toilets flushing by themselves, where were you?” Oliver asked his sister Emma after she came home from visiting Lake Erie College in Painesville. She was chewing on a stale pretzel. She cleared her throat, spitting out dryness.

   “I was in the Kilcawley Dorm,” Emma said.

   “Were you in the bathroom?”

   “I had to go to the toilet so, yes, that’s where I was.” 

   “Was there anybody else in the bathroom?”

   “No.”

   “Nobody knows who she is, but there’s a girl who haunts the bathrooms there,” Oliver said. “The toilets are the kind you have to push the handle down, but they are always flushing themselves. Sometimes when somebody is double-checking their buttons and zippers, they catch sight of her right behind them, but when they turn to see who it is, she’s going out the door.”

   Emma had been visiting Lake Erie College with her mother. The college is near where Oliver and Emma lived in Perry, Ohio and it was where their mother had gone to school. The day Emma was there she heard a ghost dog barking and doors slamming themselves shut. There were hot and cold blind spots where there shouldn’t have been any such thing. The water fountain water tasted rusty.

   “Were you in Morley Music Hall when you walked through the hot and cold spots?”

   “That’s where I was.” Emma said. “The cold was freezing cold and the hot was boiling hot.”

   “The music hall is named after Helen Morley, who most of the time is seen in a white gown floating down staircases,” Oliver said. “She plays the organ, usually old creepy songs.” The hall is one of the most musical in Ohio, housing a 64-rank E. M. Skinner organ built in 1927. When the security guards hear the organ at night, they stay away. 

   “One time a guard went inside to see who was playing the organ in the middle of the night. The spirit yelled at him to get out. She was even louder than the organ. When he didn’t leave right away she chased him out. After that the guards all went on sabbatical. Students in the pep band say they hear a woman screaming when they are practicing, but when they told a security guard about it, he said it was probably because their playing was bad, and besides, he wasn’t going to be doing anything about it anytime soon.”

   “How come mom never told us about any of this?” Emma asked. “She went to school there.” After graduating from Lake Erie College their mother went to a law school in Tennessee and practiced corporate law before having her two kids, first Emma and then Oliver. She was planning on going back to work once they were both in high school, or before that if they ran out of family funds.

   “You know how mom is, everything is practical this and practical that,” Oliver said. “She’s always telling me monsters don’t exist, even when there’s a troll in our backyard looking in through our windows and watching her every move.”

   Oliver and Emma sat in silence, thinking about their mother and the strange world they lived in. Sometimes they couldn’t make sense of it. Sometimes they thought the train of the future was going to run them over.

   “Fortune favors the brave,” Oliver said.

   “I’m going to have to check my piggy bank,” Emma said.

   “Were you in Andrews Dorm when you saw doors opening and shutting themselves?” Oliver asked.

   “Yes, that’s where I was,” Emma said.

   “That was Mary Evans,” Oliver said. “She used to be president of the college a long time ago. Nobody knows why she haunts that dorm, but she’s always knocking things off shelves, moving furniture around, and slamming doors. Did you visit College Hall or the Fowler Dorm?”

   “No.”

   “There’s ghost named Stephanie who haunts the fourth floor of College Hall. She killed herself in the belfry way back when. She gets downstairs through a mirror in the parlor. The ghost in Fowler Dorm died there. She drowned in a bathtub. She has a bad habit of staring at people who are looking at themselves in mirrors. When they turn around she’s gone.”

   “That would give me the willies,” Emma said. “They should call it that place Lake College of Eerie Women.”

   “Was Tiberius barking all the time you were on campus,” Oliver asked.

   “No, only when I was passing the Fine Arts Building.”

   “Did you see anything there?”  

   “I thought I did, but I’m not sure. I thought I saw a scarecrow, but every time I looked he wasn’t where I thought he was. He seemed to be ten feet tall and was reaching for me. His hands were like branches.”

   “That’s Old Joe Croaker. He’s not a school ghost, not exactly. He’s an old school ghost. He used to sleep in any of backyards around the campus that would have him until none of them would have him anymore. He once lived where the school is today, back when it was all farmland. I heard he was long gone, but he must be back. He’s going to have go back to where he came from.”

   “Why was Tiberius barking?”

   “He was barking because Old Joe Croaker croaks anybody who gets in his way. If he’s come back he’s got a good reason, although it won’t be good for anybody who messes with him. He has a machete he uses to cut hay and stuff himself with it. He knows how to use his blade, for sure. We’ve got to get  him to go back through the mirror he used as a doorway to get here. He’s a straw man, but he’s a dangerous straw man.”

   “Why is he dangerous?”

   “Because he’s a madman every which way, and he’s got nothing to lose. Running into him is like walking in the middle of the road. You get hit by cars from both sides.”

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

   “We are going to have to go to the school and take care of business. But it’s too far to pedal on our go-karts and besides, mom would hit the roof if we even tried.“

   “Maybe Jimmy the Jet could help us.”

   “What do you mean?” Oliver asked

   “Jimmy is fast as lightning on his roller blades. If we wore ours and made a conga line behind him we could get to the school in no time. We could go at night when everybody’s asleep and the streets are empty. Mom wouldn’t even know we were gone.”

   Two days later Oliver, Emma, and Jimmy met in the middle of the night in the nearby Perry Cemetery on Middle Ridge Rd. It was around the corner from where they lived. The remains of Princess Mona, who was the granddaughter of Cleveland’s Chief Thunderwater, were buried there. They stood at the foot of her headstone. Emma had her jackknife. Oliver had a box of kitchen matches. They made sure their skates were laced on tight.

   “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” Jimmy the Jet said as Oliver gripped his waist from behind and Emma gripped Oliver’s waist. They set off for Lake Erie College and their showdown with Old Joe Croaker. 

   Old Joe knew they were coming. He could see a few minutes into the future. His eyes had the life of dried mud in them. He leaned against a shadow, chewing on a straw he had pulled out of the back of his head. A cloud obscured the moon. Tiberius was nearby. His nose twitched as he sniffed for menace in the night. He smelled a rat.

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.

By Ed Staskus

   Lake Erie College is a liberal arts school in Painesville, Ohio not far from where the monster hunters Oliver and Emma lived in Perry. It was founded as a girl’s seminary before the Civil War. It allowed boys to join the girls in 1985. Nobody knew what took so long to get it done. Boys need good schools, too. Oliver wasn’t planning on going there, but his older sister, Emma, who was his right-hand man, was visiting the school that day with their mother, even though the day was still seven or eight years away.

   Their mom had it in mind for her daughter to attend the same school she had attended when the time came. Emma wasn’t so sure. She had heard rumors the school was haunted. She knew full well her brother wasn’t going to be around much to lend a helping hand. He was probably going to be far away when the school’s spooks started to ectoplasm and poltergeist her to death.

   Oliver had just turned eight. Emma was ten-and-a-half. She was a smart cookie. She reminded Oliver about how brainy she was every day. Oliver had long since learned to ignore her crowing, although he knew without a doubt she was smart, as well as sassy. Sparks sometimes flew fast and furious. He jumped her from behind with cries of “Brainiac Monster!” whenever she let her guard down.

   Oliver wanted to go to any college in Boston, so long as it was in Boston and it was top-notch in the sciences. The Atlantic Ocean was right there, like Lake Erie was right where they lived. Emma and he pedaled to the lake all the time. The big city of Cleveland, 30-some miles to the west of their home, had grown out of the Western Reserve. Boston was modern but ancient, century piled on century, and had more than its fair share of spooks and monsters. It might not have been the scariest city in America, but it did its best. He could be a part-time monster hunter in ‘The City of Notions’ and keep himself in pocket money.

   On top of that, Salem was nearby. It was famous for its witch trials in the 1600s. It was haunted by the spirits of 19 witches who were put to death there. Some of their spirits hung around Gallows Hills, where they had been executed, while others more footloose roamed the neighborhood streets. Bridget Bishop haunted the Lyceum Bar and Grill, where she once owned an apple orchard. Giles Corey haunted the Howard Street Cemetery. Bumping into him is an omen of something sure-enough bad on the horizon.

   New Orleans had mayhem, mysteries, and devilry in its roots. It had the mojo hand, but Oliver didn’t like floods, so Tulane University was out. He had a soft spot in his heart for the Voodoo Queen of the city, however. Marie Laveau was buried near the French Quarter, where people left bottles of booze, handfuls of money, and clumps of flowers. If you needed a favor, all you had to do was knock on her crypt three times. She always got it done. Whenever anybody stole money from her grave, their goose was cooked. She made sure those who deserved bad luck got their fair share of it.

   Savannah is one of the cities the American Institute of Parapsychology gets the most reports about. The Mercer House was once the home of Jim Williams, a voodoo-practicing antiques dealer. The house is haunted by the man he killed in an argument. Even though Jim Williams was acquitted in three separate trials, everybody knew he did the deed. The ghost knew it better than anybody and never stopped spooking the place.

   In the Bonaventure Cemetery there was mad laughter. Spirits haunted its grounds. The Pirate’s House restaurant in Savannah is haunted by a buccaneer named Captain Flint. There used to be a tunnel leading from the Rum Cellar to the street. Men would drink at the bar, get drunk, sing sea shanties, pass out, and come to on a ship miles off shore. They had been shanghaied! They were sold to sea captains and forced to set the sails and batten the hatches.

   But Oliver liked northern climates and disliked soggy humid swampy climates. Savannah’s technical colleges were out. As it was, he sweated up a storm doing his homework. He wished he could be like Thomas Edison and never go to school. He would rather find things out for himself. 

   He knew there were plenty of ghosts in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin was said to climb down from his statue in front of the American Philosophical Society Library and dance in the streets at night. He didn’t think he could deal with seeing a philosopher dance, so Grim Philly was out, too. When the landline telephone rang he answered it. It was Emma. She was on their mom’s cell phone, something she was supposed to never do.

   “How did you get mom’s phone?” he asked.

   “Never mind about that,” Emma said. “There’s a ghost dog after me.”

   “Oh, don’t worry about him, that’s just Tiberius. He’s not after you. He thinks something else is after you and is trying to protect you.”

   Emma wasn’t surprised Oliver knew who and what the ghost dog was. Even though she considered herself much smarter than her kid brother, she had to admit he knew everything about monsters near and far.

   “Did you see the statue of him?” he asked.

   “I saw a dog statue in front of a building, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.”

   “Pat him on the head for good luck when you leave.”

   Tiberius was a Labrador Retriever who had belonged to Harriot Young, a dean of the college at the turn of the 20^th century. The dog hung around, wandering the grounds, and attending classes when he wasn’t taking a nap, even though he couldn’t read or write. Everybody knew and loved Tiberius. When he died there wasn’t a dry eye on campus. He was honored with a statue in 1910. It became a tradition to pet the statue for good luck before exams. 

   Early in 1957 a student woke up in her dorm room in the middle of the night to the sound of a barking dog. The barking wouldn’t let up. She got up to see what the matter was. A friend joined her. They discovered the building was on fire. They ran back inside and woke up the other girls in the dorm. They stood outside in their night clothes as Memorial Hall burned to the ground. Nobody could say afterwards what dog raised the alarm, until they realized it must have been Tiberius, the school’s guardian.

   “A ghost dog barking wasn’t all I heard, Ollie,”  Emma said. “There are toilets flushing by themselves, lights turning on and off by themselves, doors opening and closing by themselves, moans and groans, and other creepy noises. I’ll tell you the rest of it at home.”

   Emma was a sensible girl and wasn’t about to pat any old statue on the head for luck. Shallow men believe in luck, Emma thought. Sassy girls believe in cause and effect. On the other hand, maybe she would do it just this one time. When she was leaving the campus with her mother she patted the statue of Tiberius on the head.

   Neither she nor her mother noticed  the unworldly glow in his eyes as they walked away.

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.”

Help support these stories. $25.00 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com with “Contribution” in the subject line. Payments processed by Stripe.

“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

By Ed Staskus

   Even though Clyde was a bad egg, he hadn’t always been a stinker. He was well behaved as a child, civil and polite as a teenager, and hardworking as a young adult. But then he started putting on attitude and weight and was big as a Volkswagen Bug with a muscle car roar. He started throwing his weight around. Before long he lost all his friends. Everything and everybody started to avoid him.

   He was a channel catfish. Every summer he swam out of Lake Erie past the Fairport Harbor Short Pier and up the Grand River. Except he didn’t anymore. When he was a tadpole, he went upstream looking for pools 6 to 8 feet deep, where he could play for weeks with flatheads, bullheads, and walleye. But he got too big for that. He got sick and tired, too, of being fished for, having to fight for his life. The madder he got about it the bigger he got. The bigger he got the better able he was to fight off fishermen. The more fight he put up the more his legend grew.

   An outraged angler who lost all his gear and his small boat battling Clyde posted a “Wanted Dead or Alive” flier outside Brennan’s Fish House. The picture of him didn’t do him justice, blurry and grainy. Clyde didn’t care. He wasn’t on social media. But just to set the record straight, he took a selfie and pasted it over the flier with spit.

   “That way everybody will get a good look at my teeth,” he told himself.

   Many people thought Clyde could sting them with his whiskers and barbels, but he couldn’t. What most of them didn’t know was that it was his fins that contained a venom that stung like hell and caused swelling. He didn’t usually try poking anybody with his fins, although sometimes he had to. When he stung people that was always the last time they messed around with him.

   Brennan’s was built at the end of the Civil War as a hotel called the Richmond Inn. It wasn’t working out, so the owners put in pool tables and started selling pretzels and beer. George and Martha Evans took over in 1927 and made it into a diner. They raised their ten kids in the hotel rooms. Each one got his own room and a king size bed. Harry Jones bought it 40 years later and ran the show as a bar called “Harry’s.” He and his wife lived upstairs just like the Evans family had lived upstairs.

   When Tim and Betty Brennan took it over in the 1970s, they changed the name to Brennan’s Fish House. Clyde was born before that time. After Steve and Sharon Hill took over in 2006, they kept the name. Clyde didn’t like fish houses but was glad the Hill’s kept the name. At heart he was a dyed in the wool conservative. If anybody had a problem with that, he was more than willing to tear their hanging chads to shreds with his grinding teeth.

   There were plenty of tall tales about him at Brennan’s Fish House. None of them were true although all of them were true. The more people liked the stories, the more true-to-life they became. Some of the stories were put to song.

   One time Clyde got stuck in shallow water and a passerby threw himself on top of him, trying to drag him to land. Clyde jabbed the man with one of his spiked fins and pulled him out to deeper water, where he almost drowned. Another time the local scandal sheet raised the alarm. The headline blared “Giant Catfish Attacks Water-Skier!” The story said a 14-year-old teenager minding his own business while water skiing on Lake Erie suffered a vicious attack, with a photograph of bite marks up to his knee to prove it. Even though the boy had deliberately skied up Clyde’s back, and he had bitten the boy in self-defense, he didn’t bother writing a letter to the editor to protest the slander.

   The day Oliver, his sister Emma, and his parents were at Brennan’s having chowder and yellow perch, was the day a boat from the Yacht Club drew a bead on Clyde. It was a 70-foot Outer Reef. The man at the helm saw the big catfish, gunned his diesel, and made a beeline for him. Clyde spotted him and was faster than the all-powerful engine. He dove and the yacht glanced off him. Even though he wasn’t hurt Clyde was outraged. He got under the boat and started gnawing at the fiberglass. When he finally made a hole, it was the end of the yacht. Unlike wood, fiberglass doesn’t float. The bilge pumps fell behind and the boat sank like a shooting star. 

   Captain Ahab went down with his craft, but soon surfaced shaking his fist at Clyde. The irascible catfish snagged the back of his pants, hoisted him out of the water, and tossed him ashore like so much flotsam.

   “That will show him who’s boss,” Clyde growled. He could be irascible.

   Captain Ahab walked the 200 feet from the Grand River to the 100-seat fish house. He threw himself down into a chair. From where he sat it looked like the sea. There were buoys, marine charts, brass lanterns, wooden ship wheels, and old diving helmets on the walls. From where Oliver sat, the skipper looked soggy and sad. 

   Fairport Harbor has a deep draft harbor, three boating ramps, a fishing pier, canoe and kayak access, and charter boat fishing. Oliver and Emma walked to where the charter boats were. Oliver had a postcard he had plucked off the wall at Brennan’s. They went looking for Stan the Man. When they found him, he was taking a nap on board Meals on Reelz, his 30-footer.

   “Can you take us out to have a talk with Clyde,” Oliver asked. Stan said sure and before they knew it, they were on the catfish highway. He wasn’t hard to find. Oliver put on an Island Dry snorkel set and fins.

   “Watch yourself,” Stan said. “They say he’s a thousand pounds of bottom-dwelling fury, don’t you know.”

.

   The whopper fish wasn’t far away. He was looking for his home hole along the shoreline. Oliver snuck up behind him. Clyde had excellent eyesight, though, and knew Oliver was right behind him. He stayed in place waiting for the boy to tip his hand. What Oliver did was give him the postcard he had in his hand. On the card was a color picture of Mequinenza, a place in Spain where there are thousands of Wels Catfish, the biggest freshwater fish in Europe. At the bottom of the card was written in magic marker “4000 miles, go straight east.” Oliver pointed the way.

   “What do I have to lose?” Chad asked himself. He had burnt all his bridges in Ohio He had no friends, only enemies. He was fed up with being the bad guy. In Spain he would be among his own kind, the kind of fish who would understand him. He could retire and live out his days in sun and surf, eating his fill of frogs, clams, and crayfish. Clyde turned and gave Oliver a thumb’s up, even though he didn’t have thumbs.

   “Hitch a ride with a freighter going that way,” Oliver signed in the sign language fish understand. “That way you’ll be there in two weeks rested and relaxed. You might even get a tan if the weather cooperates.” He handed Clyde a pair of Ray Bans. “These are for you if the sun gets in your eyes.” When the catfish put them on, they made him look like the Terminator. He liked the look. He nodded his thanks and set off for Spain. He wasn’t the kind of whisker fish to waste his time.

   When Oliver and Emma and their parents got home Sly and the Family Stone, their family cat, came walking out of the woods behind their house. He had a bird in his mouth. The bird was playing dead, not that Sly was fooled. Oliver put on his fins and ran at the cat, lifting his knees high, flapping the fins like a madman. The cat was so startled he lost his grip on the bird, who flew away.

   Sly and the Family Stone was disgruntled about losing his bird. All he had wanted to do was play with his prey. He narrowed his eyes, turned, and slowly walked back into the forest, looking for another friend.

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.”

Help support these stories. $25.00 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com with “Contribution” in the subject line. Payments processed by Stripe.

“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

By Ed Staskus

   When he was absolutely sure his spot in the forest was the most secret spot in the forest, MechaGodzilla settled down and checked his weapons, which were himself. He was built of space titanium and could launch missiles from his fingers and toes. He fired energy beams from his eyes and chest. He could ignite a force field that instantly repelled his enemies. Even if his head was cut off, he was still able to stay in the fight. He had a “Head Controller” that took over, firing concentrated lasers the same as before. He was trouble in spades on top of spades.

   He was going to take care of Godzilla and his little friend, Oliver. If Emma, Oliver’s sister and monster hunting right-hand man, butted in, he would take care of her, too. He didn’t care who got in his way. He was going to have his way with Godzilla, once and for all, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

   Godzilla was on a world tour promoting his new movie, which was “Godzilla vs. Kong.” When he tried to land at the Atlas Cinema Great Lakes Stadium in Mentor, Ohio, their parking lot was too small for him, so he landed in the bigger Home Depot parking lot next door. The general manager came out to complain, but after he looked up at Godzilla who was roaring “HELLO!” he went back into the store and wasn’t seen again for three day after locking himself in his office.

   The movie theater rolled out the red carpet for Godzilla, but after the big beast’s little toe hooked it, ripping it to shreds, they sent a maintenance man to sweep up the shreds and get rid of the rest of it. DQ Grill made the biggest ice cream cone in the history of DQ. They sent a young counter girl hired yesterday out with the cone for white glove delivery to Godzilla.

   “Why me?” she complained.

   The other employees nudged her out the door. Godzilla liked the ice cream cone so much he gave the girl a ride on his back, rocketing up and over Lake Erie, to Cleveland for a bird’s eye view of downtown, and buzzed over her home, sending her parents into a panic. When she walked back into DQ she was promoted on the spot.

   The first time they fought, MechaGodzilla was overpowered when King Caesar joined forces with Godzilla. They defeated him by chopping his head off and blowing his body apart. The second time they fought it was more of the same. The next version of MechaGodzilla was juiced up with human brain cells. He tag-teamed with Titanosaurus, who wasn’t much help, however. He survived, losing his head again, but when his main controls went haywire, Godzilla used his atomic heat ray on MechaGodzilla’s headless body, causing it to explode once more. 

   The third time should have been the charm, but it wasn’t meant to be. The new MechaGodzilla overpowered Godzilla but got zapped by a voltage back surge Godzilla made happen, whether he knew what he was doing, or not. When he was quickly rewired, he was rewired as Super MechaGodzilla. Rodan was in the neighborhood and told Godzilla he would be glad to help. Godzilla was knocked out when the second brain under his tail got a concussion. Rodan was hurt bad in the fight. He wasn’t going to make it, so he gave up what life force he had left to revive Godzilla, who used his spiral atomic breath to destroy the not-so-super-after-all MechaGodzilla.

   But a bad penny always comes back. The bad penny sulked and smoldered in the forest behind Oliver’s house in Perry, not far from Mentor. When the movie star showed up to visit his grandchild Goo Goo’s friend is when the bad penny would make his move. If anybody got in his way, he would move on them, too. He was sick and tired of being on the losing end.

   After the premiere of the movie Godzilla took questions, signed autographs, posed for selfies, and finally sacked out on the Home Depot parking lot. When the general manager peeked out in the middle of the night to see if the coast was clear and heard Godzilla snoring, he went right back into his office and locked himself in again.

   Oliver and Emma got up early and went for a walk in the forest while their mother made breakfast. Godzilla liked eating fish and krill, Jello, cars, helicopters, and radio towers. She made him a humongous Jello salad and made it look like a car. Oliver’s father went out into their back yard with a spray paint can. He sprayed “EAT THIS” on the base of the 150-foot-tall cell phone tower that had recently been erected on the border of their property.

   “That thing is an eyesore,” he said to himself spray painting “EAT THIS” on the thing.

   That night Oliver and Emma outfitted themselves in black from tip to toe. They both wore balaclavas. A thunderstorm was brewing. It was coming in fast over Lake Erie. Emma saw MechaGodzilla first and stopped dead in her tracks. Oliver was picking up worms for Godzilla. They were good for his big buddy’s digestion. He looked back at his sister.

   “What’s wrong?” he asked.

    “Look,” Emma said pointing a shaking finger at the gleaming metallic monster. She and her brother slipped behind a tree. “Wait until it starts thundering,” Oliver said. “Then follow my lead. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back.” When the storm broke wide open, Oliver stepped out into the open and waved his arms over his head.

   “Hey, you big lunkhead, over here.”

   MechaGodzilla turned his head. “Who are you calling a lunkhead, you little squirt? Beat it!” His eyesight was bad in the dark. He didn’t realize it was Oliver using a slingshot to sling rocks at him. They clanged off the metalhead. He looked down at the boy, who was like an insect to him. Sticks and stones weren’t going to hurt him. He ignored David and his slingshot..

   “You are just a heap of scrap metal,” Oliver shouted.

  MechaGodzilla didn’t like that. He started shooting laser beams. Oliver and Emma ran the other way. It was raining harder and harder, lightning bolts lighting up the sky. They burst out of the forest into the clearing behind their house, MechaGodzilla hard on their heels. Laser beams were flashing out of every part of him.

   Suddenly the sky boomed and cracked, and a lightning bolt zig zagged down from a mass of black clouds. It hit MechaGodzilla on the top of the head and stopped him dead in his tracks. Every part of him went crazy and he lit up like a carnival sideshow. When the show was over the new-age Frankenstein toppled over, smoke dribbling out of the seams of him. He lay there like a heap of scrap metal.

   “You took a big chance doing what you did,” his father, an electrical engineer, said when the family gathered at the feet of the fallen creature.

   “Yes and no, dad,” Oliver said. “You always say to be careful during thunderstorms, but not to worry about metal attracting lightning, because that is a myth. You told us height, isolation, and a pointy shape are what make it likely a lightning bolt will strike. I was sure once Emma and I got him out in the open, since he had a pointy head and was so big, lightning would strike, and it did.”

   Godzilla came walking up. His head snapped around when he saw MechaGodzilla laying in the weeds. He walked towards him, eyeing him carefully, and bumped into the cell phone tower in front of him. His nose was in the lead and took the bump full force. Godzilla jumped back, roared, and unleashed his atomic fire breath on the tower. It sizzled and glopped to the ground melting and smoking. It lay next to MechaGodzilla, both of them a wreck.

   “I’ll eat that later,” Godzilla said, satisfied with his work.

   “Good riddance to that thing,” Oliver’s father said, not noticing their neighbors standing in the street waving their cell phones in the air trying to catch a signal.

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.”

Help support these stories. $25.00 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com with “Contribution” in the subject line. Payments processed by Stripe.

“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