By Ed Staskus

   Oliver and Emma were standing at the side of the road looking up at a sign. it was a road sign for Wisner Rd., which was in Geauga County, next door to Lake County where they lived. They were in Geauga County for the annual Maple Festival, which included rides and concessions, a lumberjack competition, and a parade through Chardon Square. Ricky & the Rockets played classic rock favorites on the Entertainment Stage.

   It was Sunday morning. Sunshine had been rumored since the  festival opened on Thursday. It had finally shown up. They had breakfast in the Pancake Tent and were looking forward to seeing Swifty the Clown, Jungle Terry, and the Grand Parade later on. In the meantime, they were  on Wisner Rd. waiting to high-five their father running in the five mile Sap Race.

   “They’re going to be coming right by here, right?” Olver asked. 

   “That’s what the map says” Emma said.

    “After that we’ll go looking for the Melon Heads.”

   “What if we find them?”

   Oliver pulled a homemade ray gun out of his pocket.

   “Did you ever get that thing to work?”

   “Sort of.”

   “That’s better than nothing.”

   After finishing their buttermilk pancakes, and while walking through Chardon Square, they saw a man at a booth selling a book called “Monsters of Ohio.” The man was J. C. Raphael. They stopped at the booth.

   “Are there any monsters around here?” Oliver asked.

   “There are the Melon Heads,” J. C. Raphael said. ‘If you go just a little ways down the road, you get to Wisner, which is sort of the epicenter of the legend. If you ask anyone in Geauga County about Melon Heads, they’ll have at least a story or they’ll know someone who has searched for them personally. I think there’s something exciting about that.”

   The Melon Heads were once children. A Geauga County doctor by the name of Dr. Crow had started treating some of them after World War Two. He lived in the woods off Wisner Rd. where he had a small institute. The children he treated had water on the brain. The large pockets of water in their brains made their heads look like melons. 

   The children lived with Dr. Crow. Nobody else wanted them. They were ostracized because of their big heads. Families, orphanages, and local authorities sent children to him. He studied them, explored remedies, and looked for a cure. He never found one and passed away of old age. His home and institute fell into disrepair. 

   In the 1980s a rumor made the rounds that Dr. Crow had performed medical experiments on the children, creating creatures with small, malformed bodies and even bigger heads. It was thought he had injected extra fluid into their heads to make them bigger. Some said the children killed Dr. Crow and ran away into the surrounding woodlands. One by one they went insane.

   When they did they started stealing pets and food. They attacked anyone who crossed their path. They had grown to hate human beings. Nobody went looking for them alone or at night. Most of the Melon Heads died off, but some had children of their own, passing on their deformities and insanity. Some believed they lived in a secret place beneath the ruins of Dr. Crow’s house.

   “That’s where we should start,” Oliver said.

   “Do you know where it is?” Emma asked

   “No, but Ralph said he would meet us here and help sniff it out.”

   Ralph was a honey badger who lived in the woods behind where Oliver and Emma lived in Perry. His favorite food was grubs and rodents, although he ate anything that came his way When he did he ate ail of the fur, feathers, and bones, too. Ralph wasn’t afraid of anything. If an insane Melon Head messed with him he would probably eat it, and  that would be that.

   They saw their father coming in in the middle of a long line of runners. He was easy to spot. He was wearing lime green Saucony running shoes. They waved at him and he waved at them. Ralph showed up a few minutes later and they tramped into the woodlands.

   The honey badger found the ruins of Dr. Crow’s house in ten minutes.

   “How does he do that?” Emma asked. “It would have taken us all day.”

   “He has a great sense of smell.”

   “He smelled the ruins out?”

   “I guess so,” Oliver said. “Anyway, the proof is in the pudding.”

   “Do you think there’s a secret place underneath there?”

   “If there is, Ralph will find it.”

   Honey badgers are excellent diggers. They have long, sharp claws. When they are away from home they dig burrows whenever they want to take a nap. It doesn’t take them long. The can dig out a hiding hole in a matter of minutes.

   Ralph sniffed out the secret place and started digging. He stopped digging when he found a passageway. Olver and Emma slid down into it behind him. Emma turned on her pocket flashlight, although Ralph led the way. They made their way to a warren. When Ralph saw it he nodded his approval and curled up in a corner to get some shut eye. It had been a long walk from Perry to Chardon.

   The Melon Heads weren’t what they expected. They looked like Ma and Pa Kettle. They were brother and sister. Pa Melon Head was in an armchair reading a newspaper. He was smoking a briar pipe.  Ma Melon Head was in another armchair knitting. She was smoking a pipe, too. It was a corncob pipe. Their heads were slightly larger than usual, but not by much.

   “Oh, we’re sorry to bother you,” Oliver said. “We were looking for the monster Melon Heads.”

   “You’ve come to the right place.”

   “No, the crazy ones with gigantic heads who terrorize everybody in this neighborhood.”

   “That’s us, sonny.”

   “But everybody says you’re dangerous.”

   Pa Melon Head coughed politely. Ma Melon Head laughed. 

   “We’ve heard all kinds of tall tales about us,” she said.  “One of them is that Dr. Crow and his wife were arguing, hepushed her, she hit her head on a cabinet and died, and that we then maliciously killed him and burned down the house. That didn’t happen. He wasn’t married anymore.”

   The house  burned down a long time after Dr. Crow’s death. Teenagers were partying in the abandoned house and burned it down playing with matches. “Another tall tale is that we steal people’s children and eat them. That isn’t true, either. We are both vegetarians.”

   “They say we have deformed limbs, glowing red eyes, and  razor-like teeth,” Pa Melon Head said. “I wear dentures and they are the least razor-like anything about me. Ma’s eyes only glow red when she hears the lies about us.”

   “Rumors are spread by fools and accepted by idiots,” Ma Melon Head said. “Especially in this day and age.”

   Oliver and Emma were chagrined. Oliver poked Ralph awake, who started looking around for something to eat. He was always hungry. “We are very sorry to have bothered you,” Emma said.

   “You won’t say anything about us to anybody, will you? We enjoy our privacy.”

   “Our lips are sealed,” Oliver said.

    They had just crossed Wisner Rd. on their way back to the Maple Festival when a woman stopped them, asking if they were looking for the Melon Heads.

   “We were but we found out there aren’t any.”

   “That’s good, foolish children are a nuisance,” Rosemary Richards said. “I know all about the crazy stories, but what can you do?” Trying to undo a crazy story is like trying to unring a bell. 

   “You could call it defamation of character, but we don’t care now that he’s gone.” Dr. Crow was Rosemary’s great-uncle. “I don’t know what he would have thought. He might have laughed about it, he might not. My cousin always said, don’t think about it, don’t even try to do anything about it.”

   “My dad always says never complain, never explain,” Oliver said.

   “Are you on your way back to the square?” Rosemary asked.

   “Yes, we don’t  want to miss Swifty the Clown.”

   “In that case, you had better hurry.”

   Oliver and Emma set off. Ralph led the way. He knew for sure there would be rich pickings at the fairgrounds, There were always scraps of fried pickles, fried cheese curds, and fried onion rings on the ground all over the place.

   “How he doesn’t gain weight is beyond me,” Emma said, looking down at Ralph going at a deep-fried Oreo.

   “He’s got a hollow leg, for sure,” Oliver said, biting into a slice of  muskmelon. It was juicy with a pungent aroma.

   Just then their father walked up, sweaty and flushed. 

   “Guess what kids, I think I saw a Melon Head behind a tree during the race.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  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.”

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

Coming of age in the rough and tumble of the 1960s and 1970s. A collection of street level short stories set in Cleveland, Ohio.

Available on Amazon:

A Crying of Lot 49 Production