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

By Ed Staskus

   “You’ve got to help me Ollie,” Tommy One Shoe said. Tommy always wore two shoes, but the one time he didn’t was in public, and after that he became near far and wide the One Shoe boy. He didn’t especially like the nickname. He preferred Tommy Terrific.

   “What’s the matter?” Oliver asked throwing himself on Tommy’s bed.

   Tommy lived in the same development in Perry, Ohio as Oliver did. They were practically best friends. They rode pedal power go karts together on the empty streets of their development all the time.

   “I was drawing monsters last week and now one of them has come to life,” Tommy said. He scratched his chest. “I’ve got a rash,” he said.

   “Oh, that’s not good. Can you show me the drawing?”

   Tommy brought a legal pad to the bed and threw himself down next to Oliver. He flipped to the second-last page. There was Evil Eye Balor, the headless Dullahan, and the three-headed Ellen Trehend. The space next to Evil Eye Balor was empty.

   “Are you Irish?”

   “My granny is Irish. She lives with us in the basement. My dad put a kitchen and a bathroom down there. She’s got her own sitting room and bedroom. She never has to leave if she doesn’t want to. She can hardly walk anymore so she stays in the basement most of the time, anyway.”

   “That’s too bad.”

   “Yeah.”

   “Which one came to life?”

   “The Banshee. After that, when she wasn’t on the paper anymore, I started hearing noises in the basement at night. Mom and dad said they haven’t heard anything, but they both sleep like logs. My sister snores and only ever hears her own snoring. When I asked granny, she just grumbled and said she hasn’t heard a thing.”

   “What kind of a noise is it?”

   “It’s like crying.”

   “Is it crying or more like wailing?”

   “What’s wailing?”

   “It’s like really bad crying, like if you cut your finger off by accident.”

   “It’s more like that.”

   “That’s a Banshee, for sure,” Oliver said. “Thank goodness it’s not the Babadook.”

   Banshees are fairy women who keen, shriek, and wail, most of the time because they know somebody in the family is going to die. They have long streaming hair and wear dark cloaks and green dresses. They hide in closets, sleeping on piles of socks. Sometimes they are young and sometimes they are old. Sometimes they are tall. Other times they are short.

   “Was your Banshee tall or short?”

   “She was short, about half the size of Evil Eye.”

   “Then she’s the older kind of Banshee,” Oliver said. “Was she outside under a full moon?”

   “Yes, how did you know?”

   He made it his business to know everything about monsters. He knew if the Banshee was short and wailing at night under a full moon it meant certain death to somebody in Tommy One Shoe’s family. The cry of the banshee is sad and mournful beyond all other sounds.

   “Does the crying make you feel like you are at a funeral?”

   “Just like that,” Tommy said.

    How are your mom and dad doing?”

   “Good.”

   “No problems?”

   “No, except they are always watching gruesome serial killer shows on TV.” 

   “How about your sister?”

   “All she ever does is ask mom and dad when she can start dating.”

   “How about your grandma?”

   “She’s always saying most her friends are dead and she just wants to die, too.”

   “When did your grandpa die?”

   “Last winter. That’s the funeral I went to. It was the coldest day ever. They had something like a wedding reception tent over the grave, except they lowered the flaps to keep the wind off us. It was icy. We all squeezed in like sardines. I thought I was going to get freezer burn.”

   “When’s the best time to talk to your grandma?”

   “Anytime except daytime. She’s always watching masses on TV, if she’s not napping, which she does a whole lot of. Mom and dad are going out to dinner tomorrow and my sister will probably sneak out on a top-secret date.”

   “All right, I’ll come over tomorrow after dinner.”

   The next day Oliver and Tommy tiptoed down to the basement. Tommy’s grandma Orla was playing solitaire at her reading, knitting, crossword puzzle table. There were stacks of Sudoku paperbacks under the table. Oliver pegged her at close to a three hundred years old.

   “How old is she?” he whispered asking Tommy.

   “She says she 94, but she’s been saying that for as long as I can remember.”

   “Who are you two?” she asked.

   “I’m your grandson”

   “Who’s he?”

   “That’s my friend Oliver.”

   “Where are we?”

   “We’re at your house.”

   “How long have I been here?”

   “Ever since grandpa got sick three years ago.”

   “Who’s grandpa?”

   “Her memory is bad,” Tommy said to Oliver. “She’s going haywire.”

   The old woman was trimming her fingernails with a pair of scissors.  “My thinking has gone bad,” she said. “I never thought I would get as wacky as I’ve become.”

   When she stood up to make tea she couldn’t straighten up, remaining hunched over. She shuffled to the stove, one hand always on something, the back of a chair, the countertop, or a wall, for balance. The teacup wobbled in her hand coming back to the table. She didn’t spill a drop though, having filled the cup only to the half mark.

   “I wish my husband was here, but he went somewhere,” Orla said. “He hasn’t come back yet. I’ve been waiting for him.”

   Neither Tommy nor Oliver knew what to say. Neither of them wanted to say her husband was dead and gone. Neither wanted to be the first to say he was never coming back.

   “Have you heard any crying in the middle of the night?” Oliver asked.

   “I never cry,” Orla said.

   “I meant somebody else crying.”

   “I’m dead to the world when I sleep,” she said.

   “Granny, we think there’s a Banshee on the loose down here,” Tommy said.

   “That would be bad,” she said.

   “Where were you born?” Oliver asked.

   “I’m from Gortnadeeve, not far from Keeloges Bog.”

   “Did you ever fall into the bog?”

   “No, mum always warned us to stay away from it. We lived on a lovely farm, and I stayed on the farm, but pa and my older brother were killed after the Rising, and we had to come to America.”

   “When was that, what year?” 

   “Let’s see, I would have been nine or ten, so maybe 1930.”

   “So, you’re not more than one hundred years old?”

   “No, not yet my boy.”

    Banshees don’t bring death but warn that death is near. It gives the family a chance to prepare. Oliver knew it was going to be a family member and it seemed most likely to be Orla, who was close to one hundred years old. However, she wasn’t the fateful 106 years old yet. That was when Banshees were always right, which was when somebody made it to 106 years.

   “Can we come back tomorrow?” Oliver asked. “I think I know a way to banish the Banshee.”

   “Of course.”

   The next evening after dinner Oliver knocked on Tommy’s front door and they went down to the basement. Oliver had a knapsack and his sister Emma’s jackknife. Orla made tea and the three of them sat at the round table. Oliver mixed rosemary, sage, oregano, coriander, his green tea, yarrow powder, and a handful of chicken bones in a bowl.

   “I need some of your blood,” he said to Orla.

   “Don’t take too much,” she said.

   Oliver made a cut on the tip of her right index finger with the jackknife and squeezed three drops of blood into the bowl. He stirred the mixture and waited. Orla and Tommy waited. Nothing happened. Suddenly a blinding blue light streamed out of the bowl and flew in circles. A terrible wailing tore the heart out of the room. A banshee appeared, struggling, arms and legs flailing like Kilkenny cats, and in a flash was gone through the closed door, up the stairs, and out of the house. The next second all was quiet in the basement

   “I think I need a good stiff snort of John Barleycorn,” Orla said reaching for the cabinet door behind her.

   “Granny!” Tommy exclaimed.

   “Save your breath to cool your soup,” Oliver said, slipping Granny Orla a crafty smile.

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.”

“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 first time Oliver saw the Aitvaras it was parading through their family kitchen. When it got to the sliding door leading to the patio it walked right through the screen door without opening it. The screen wasn’t torn in the least. Once on the patio it transformed into a black dragon and flew away, its tail glowing like a comet.

   Oliver poured himself a glass of apple juice and went upstairs, walking into his father’s home office. His father was an electrical engineer. Ever since the pandemic he split his time working in his Beachwood office and working remotely at home. He was home today, blinking at his laptop, scratching his head and taking notes.

   “Dad, did you and mom invite a rooster over?”

   “No, we didn’t bud,” his father said. “Why do you ask?”

   “I was just in the kitchen when a rooster with blue legs and a fiery red tail walked in. It went out on the patio, changed into a dragon, and flew away.”

   “Was it smoking a pipe?”

   “I think so,” Oliver said.

   “That’s an Aitvaras. They’re from the old country, from Lithuania. If you see it again don’t let it in the house. If you see it in the house, kick it out. If you’re outside and it has shapeshifted into a dragon, be careful. He will roast you with his fiery breath at the drop of a hat. On top of everything else, his breath is as bad as a tar pit.”

   “OK,” Oliver said going back to the kitchen to put his glass away.

   His mother was the German side of the family. His father was the Lithuanian side of the family. Oliver and his sister Emma were 100% birds of a feather. The Aitvaras was a 100% Baltic pagan. What he was up to was not a mixed bag. Whatever he was up was bad.

   Oliver crept into Emma’s room in the middle of the night and shook her awake. She was his right-hand man. She was a heavy sleeper. Oliver, on the other hand, always slept with one eye open. He knew full well one too many monsters knew where he lived. 

   “Do you hear that?” he asked. There was a scratching noise downstairs followed by a pecking noise.

   “What is it?” Emma asked.

   “I think it’s the rooster.”

   They snuck downstairs, Oliver leading the way with his flashlight and Emma gripping her jackknife. It was a special operations operation. They skipped the step near the bottom that creaked. They were quiet as worms. They were stealthy as SEALS.

   The most secretive Lithuanian Special Operations Force units are squadrons that go by the codename Aitvaras. Nobody knows who they are. Sometimes even they don’t know who they are. They carry out top-secret classified missions. They didn’t know how to shape shift, but were boning up on it.

   There wasn’t anything downstairs except an extra toaster on the kitchen counter. They didn’t know Aitvarai can shapeshift to resemble household objects. A line of crumble feed on the floor led from the kitchen past the bathroom down a hallway and into the garage. When they turned the garage light on, they were taken by surprise by the sight of it filled with stolen goods. There was Tommy One Shoe’s bike, Jimmy the Jet’s skateboard, their next-door neighbor’s Cooper Mini, and somebody’s brand new Sabre gas grill.

   Back in the kitchen they decided not to tell their parents anything until morning. It started raining. Suddenly the extra toaster morphed back into the Aitvaras. It went through the closed window above the sink and turned into a serpentine-bodied dragon. The window stayed where it was. The dragon opened its mouth and started drinking the rain. Soon all the rain for miles was flowing towards their house and going down the gullet of the beast.

   “That thing will cause a drought if it stays that thirsty,” Emma said.

   There were more than a dozen nurseries and fruit farms around their hometown. If the Aitvaras drank all the rain, all the showers and thunderstorms, they would end up in big trouble. Besides that, Oliver and Emma would be out of fresh fruit. They both ate at least one apple a day.

   In the morning their mother called the Perry Police Department about the stolen goods while their father made a list of the hot stuff and took pictures of everything. “Aitvarai are born thieves,” their father said. “They can turn themselves into black crows and black cats. But if that happens Sly will take care of it.” Sly and the Family Stone was the family’s guard dog cat. “This one is probably living in the forest and wants to be our family guardian. That’s how they trick you. We can’t let that happen. We would become his slaves. Sneaking in is one thing, but once we invite him in it will be almost impossible to get rid of him. They are creatures that bring good fortune by ill means.”

   “It was a toaster last night,” Oliver said.

   “They like to lay low behind stoves,” his father said. “We’ll leave him an omelet every morning  so that he doesn’t get his dander up in the meantime. If we mess with him too much when he’s in the house, he will infest all of us with lice.”

   Emma started scratching herself in spite of herself. Oliver chewed on his thumb. He was trying to come up with a plan. Emma turned the TV on. “Ollie, look,” she shouted pointing at the flat screen. “It’s that lawyer man from the White House, the Rudy man. He’s on ‘The Masked Singer.’ He’s dressed up in a rooster costume and he’s singing ‘Bad to the Bone.’”

   The next morning, after their father had gone to his office in Beachwood, and their mother was at the grocery store, Emma whipped up a special omelet in an eight by two cake pan. It was loaded with Valerian root. She would only be nine years old in a month, but she handled herself in the kitchen like an old pro. She covered the cake pan with aluminum foil to keep it warm. Jimmy the Jet put on oven mitts. He was going to carry it into the forest and tempt the Aitvaras out of the trees.

   “Don’t forget, stay ahead of him and don’t let him catch you until you’re back here in our backyard,” Oliver said. “I want him on the stone patio.”

   “I brought my longboard instead of my skateboard,” Jimmy said. “He won’t catch me.” Longboards go faster than skateboards. It’s because they have larger and softer wheels than skateboards so they can go over gravel and twigs easier. Their bearings are higher quality, too, allowing for faster speeds.

   “Why do you want him on the patio?” Jimmy asked.

   “Because they can heal themselves by digging their spurs into earth, but not stone. I want you to leave the cake pan on the picnic table there.”

   Ten minutes later Jimmy the Jet burst out of the forest like a bat out of hell with the dragon from hell hard on his heels. Jimmy zig zagged to keep the beast away from him. When he got to the patio, he threw the cake pan down and raced away for his life. The dragon skidded to a stop and sunk his snout into the omelet.

   Valerian root is an herb but it’s a drug, too. Once it gets into your brain it makes you sleepy. There was enough Valerian root in the omelet to make all of their hometown go to sleep all at once. The dragon was out like a light before it took a three bites. It plopped down on the sandstone patio pavers and was soon gurgling like a baby.

   Oliver had run a wire from a lightning rod he had stuck in the middle of the field behind their house to the patio. He wrapped his end of it around the dragon’s gnarly big toe. The rooster was snoring like an old geezer after a long night bender.

   Aitvarai are born from falling meteorites. They come to life as sparks when the meteorite burns up in the atmosphere. It started to rain. A thunderstorm was rolling in off Lake Erie. Oliver and Emma slipped inside the kitchen. The sky got inky dark. Lightning bolts boomed and flashed over the roof. When one of them hit the lightning rod the Aitvaras lit up like the 4^th of July and exploded. All that was left of him was a single spark.

   Oliver ran outside and nudged the spark into one of his mom’s Ball jars. He screwed the top down tight and wound electrical tape around it. The jar got as bright as a bonfire. They could hear the spark squeaking.

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

   “I’m going to ask dad to mail it to the Devil’s Museum in Kaunas,” Oliver said.

   That’s what he did in the morning and it was where his father sent the Aitvaras, back to the old country, where he was displayed in a bulletproof glass case, becoming the star of the show.

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.”

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “She’s a big one,” he marveled.

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

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

   “Now what?” she wondered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   It started in 1974 when the Grand River became Ohio’s second ever wild river gone scenic. It is bordered by forests of ash, maple, and swamp white oak. The slow steady flow of water along the wetlands makes habitat for wildlife. The lower section of the river in Lake County is designated still wild and even more scenic. There are steep valley walls of Chagrin Shale. After rainstorms sudden waterfalls sweep over the bluffs. Ducks and geese love the place.

   The Grand River has its own partnership group working with the Ohio Scenic Rivers Association to assist with preservation. When their work was done, they had no idea they had created a habitat for Gill Man. Oliver warned them the year he spotted the creature, but they were not of a mind to listen to a six-year-old. When he warned them again a year later, they said they weren’t of a mind to listen to a seven-year-old. 

   “That boy is making more noise than a skeleton key throwing a fit on a tin roof,” the big man who made the rules said.

   Oliver rolled his eyes.

   “Don’t roll your eyes at me, son,” the big man said. “Pay attention to me. I’m not just talking to hear my head roar.”

   “What about all the swimmers and paddlers and fishermen?” Oliver asked.

   “There isn’t any monster in that river. Now go, I say go away boy, you’re bothering me,” is what he got for his trouble.

    The Grand River follows a 98-mile course to Lake Erie. It rambles through five different counties, finishing up in Fairport Harbor. The Geological Survey says it is the most biologically diverse river of its kind in the Lake Erie basin. There is plenty of wildlife, including wild turkey, bald eagles, and river otter. They stay away from Gill Man morning, noon, and night.

    There are camping sites the Lake Metroparks has carved out for outdoorsmen. They are on the primitive side as campgrounds go. Each site has a picnic table, grill, and a place to pitch a tent. Everybody gets their own fire ring. Campers are expected to pack-in and pack-out. There are no restrooms. 

   There is no rest for the wicked, either, especially if they run into Gill Man. Unlike the down-home wildlife, most people don’t know anything about Gill Man and don’t want to know anything. Whenever they bumped into him it scared the pants off them. Oliver knew all about the monster and wasn’t going to be scared out of his pants. His nerves were rock lobster steady.

   One of the camping sites is four miles downstream from Hidden Valley Park in Madison. Oliver and his sister Emma and their parents carried their gear and two kayaks a half mile from the parking lot to their weekend fire ring. That Friday night they grilled shish kebabs and roasted marshmallows. They had a tent, but the night was fair, and they slept under the stars. The next day after breakfast they slid their kayaks into the river and set off.

   They went against the current so they could come back with the current. They paddled under South Madison Rd., past Strong Cabin, and around Hogback Ridge Park. They were north of the Debonne Vineyards when they ran into the bigman who made the rules. He was at the head of a four-man Nighthawk canoe, although two of the men were women. The man at the stern was doing most of the heavy paddling. He was a bite-sized man.

   They looked happy. They were happy. They had just come from a stopover at Benny Vino Urban Winery, where they lingered long for tastings. The craft pulled up to each other, everybody said hello, and agreed it was a wonderful day. Before going their separate ways Oliver warned the day trippers in the Nighthawk to watch out for Gill Man.

   “You’re doing a lot of chopping, son, but no chips are flying,” the big man who made the rules said. “There’s no Gill Man. I say you’re way off base on this one.”

   Emma, who was Oliver’s right-hand man, stood up for her younger brother, saying, “When it comes to monsters, mister, he’s the Ph.D. of them in Lake County.”

   “Look sister,” the big man laughed. “Is any of what I’m saying filtering through that little blue bonnet of yours?”

   “What blue bonnet?” Emma asked. She was wearing a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. The Indians weren’t the Indians anymore, but she liked Chief Wahoo. She liked his big teeth and big smile. He had a friendly face.

   Their mother reckoned they had gone far enough and besides, she had a surprise for lunch. They turned their kayaks around and followed the Nighthawk, which wasn’t hard to do. What muscles of the man in the stern had were as soggy as a used tea bag, since he was the only one paddling. The two women were non-stop chatting while the big man who made the rules was looking through his binoculars for eagles.

   He never saw the quiet as a fox and strong as an ox Gill Man reaching for him until green claws grabbed him and pulled him out of the boat. When he tried to push Gill Man away, he was rewarded with a wet slap to the face.

   “I say, what’s the big idea bashing me in the bazooka that way!” he complained.

   Gill Man didn’t understand English and ignored everything the man said. The man never stopped yelling and complaining. “Oh, shut up already,” Gill Man finally said, but it was in the language of the Black Lagoon, where he had been born and bred. He couldn’t remember how he ended up in Ohio, more than a thousand miles from the Everglades National Park, many years earlier. It wasn’t hot enough in the summer and way too cold in the winter. If he knew the way back, he would have gone back in a heartbeat, which was one beat a minute.

   “Help, help!” the big man cried “He doesn’t know when to stop. Help me!”

   “What should we do?” Oliver’s father asked. 

   “We need to turn Gill Man into a fish out of water,” Oliver said. “Get him out of his element, get him on land where he is slow and clumsy. Watch out for his hands, though.”

   The creature had webbed hands with sharp claws on the tips of each finger. His scaly skin was tough as nails. Bullets meant nothing to him. They bounced off him. He was amphibious, breathing in and out of water.

   “Do you remember how to lasso?” Oliver asked his father.

   Oliver’s father had been a trick rider in rodeos putting himself through college when he was a student.

   “It’s like riding a bike.”

   He made a Honda knot with the rope at the bottom of the kayak. They paddled as fast as they could after Gill Man and snared him with the rope. There was a titanic struggle. They threw the rope landward, tied it around a tree, and hauled Gill Man ashore. The big man who made the rules coughed up water and phlegm, shaking himself like a dog. Gill Man roared loud and louder. They wound the rope around him, pinning him to the tree, until he couldn’t move. 

   “I brought some rotenone just in case,” Oliver said.

   “What’s that?” Emma asked.

   “It’s like kryptonite to Gill Men.”

   Oliver sprayed Gill Man in the nose. His day started to turn to night. An inky darkness came over the creature. He sank into it, his dreams gone dreamless.

   When the Perry Fire Department showed up, they didn’t know what to do with him. Oliver talked to the chief. The chief got on his blower and called for a quint truck. It took six firemen to carry the unconscious Gill Man to the water tanker and toss him inside. They made sure the lid was shut tight. They double checked and checked again.

   Two days later the truck pulled up to the Black Lagoon in the Everglades and dumped Gill Man out. He was never so happy in his life. He waved goodbye to the firemen. They saluted him, the tips of their index fingers tapping the lower-right part of the brim of their caps

    Back at their camp site Emma and Oliver watched their mother bring crescent dough wrapped around hot dogs out of the cooler. She stuck them on roasting sticks while their father got a fire going. They sat around the fire.

   “Pigs in a blanket!” Emma and Oliver exclaimed at the same time, hungry as hard-working fishermen with a tall tale to tell at the end of the long day.

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

   Nobody knew why Orange Eyes wanted to go back to the Riverside Cemetery in Cleveland, but he did. Even Frogman, his neighbor, didn’t know. All he knew was one morning his good buddy was hitchhiking on Route 603. After two days of nobody picking him up and lots of fender benders caused by surprised drivers swerving at the sight of him, he started hoofing it. 

   He stood out like a sore thumb. He was 9 feet tall, tipped the scales at a quarter ton, and was green as celery. He could have been the Plantman of Ashland, since if he lost an arm or a leg it grew back like plants do it, but he wasn’t. He belonged to the Bigfoot clan. Everybody called him Orange Eyes.

   “It’s the first thing everybody notices,” Frogman said. “They glow like coals.”

   Charles Mill Lake south of Ashland had been his home for many years. He knew all the nooks and crannies on the shoreline. The first time anybody ever saw him there was when he bumped into the back of a 1947 Buick Super Sedan parked on Ruggles Rd. on a dark overcast night in March 1959. Ruggles Rd. was known as Lover’s Lane among teenagers in Ashland and Mansfield. Every spring night it was packed with parked cars all steamed up. When he looked through the rear window of the Buick, he scared the pants off a pair of teenagers trying to get to second base. They didn’t bother to button up racing away for home.

   Orange Eyes couldn’t remember where he had been born, but he remembered the night he walked into Riverside Cemetery on Pearl Rd. in 1881, five years after it opened. It was 100 acres of lakes and elm-lined shady paths. When he found a tunnel under the graveyard, he knew it was the place for him. He stayed for almost 70 years.

   His hideaway was home, but after World War Two was won and done Cleveland grew like nobody’s business. Urban expansion pushed into the west and south sides. He heard about “I Like Ike” plans for Interstate 71 and State Route 176, which would cut the cemetery off from the Cuyahoga River. It was where he went fishing every night. What was he going to eat? He didn’t want to try any cafeterias in the steel plants. The food was out-of-date by the time it got there.

   He walked the 70 miles south to Charles Mill Lake and had been there ever since. The living was easy most of the time, except for the picnic mash-up. It was a big mistake. It could have cost him an arm or a leg.

   He was stretching his legs and rambled into the middle of a middle of the night get together. It was a steamy summer night and there was a full moon. Nobody could sleep, including Orange Eyes. Three or four families were laying out on blankets eating cold chicken and potato salad. The men and women were drinking Schlitz beer. The kids were worn out and sprawled all over the place.

   He wasn’t watching his step and almost stepped on one of the kids. There was a pause and then pandemonium. The boy went one way, and he went the other way.

   Once the horrified picnickers got over their fright, the men armed themselves with baseball bats and tire irons. The women and children locked themselves in their cars. The posse beat the bushes for him. They met with failure, which was a blessing in disguise for everybody involved. Orange Eyes was hermit-like and laid-back most of the time, but if his dander was up, he could be more than a handful.

   The Boy Scouts were the last straw. He was dodging their tents one night when their middle of the night look-out, the only one of the band of brothers who took his duties seriously and never fell asleep, spotted him. He raised the alarm. Before Orange Eyes knew it, he was being chased by a pack of over-excited twelve-year-old boys armed with flashlights and rope.

   He could run twice as fast as them and easily gave the juvenile lynch mob the slip.

   After that he decided to go back to Riverside Cemetery, come hell or high water. When he got to Cleveland, he swam across the Cuyahoga River near the Denison Harvard Bridge. Getting to the other side was easy. Getting to the cemetery was going to be hard. The Jennings Highway was between him and home. He ran across Steelyard Drive when there was a gap in the traffic. Crouching in the weeds, he saw the highway was city-size wide and brisk with cars.

   In the meantime, Oliver and Emma were in the back seat of their mom’s Jeep Cherokee. She was in St. Louis for a legal conference. Their dad was driving. They were leaving Progressive Field and reliving the sights and sounds of the baseball game. The Indians were in 2^nd place behind the Chicago White Sox, but it was July 31^st and there was still a long way to go. They had pulled out that night’s game against the White Sox by a score of 12 – 11 in a game featuring 8 home runs.

   The 19 virus was fading fast in the face of vaccinations, and the stadium had been packed. Every time the Tribe cleared the fences fireworks lit up the sky. Everybody except the White Sox went home happy. They went back to their hotel to a down in the dumps late-night snack.

   They had just passed West 14^th St., on their way home to Perry, when Oliver, who had a nose for monsters, saw the burning eyes of the creature stuck in place by the unending traffic.

   “Dad, dad, stop, there’s a Bigfoot, the green thing!” he shouted, lowering his side window, and pointing. “I think it’s Orange Eyes.” Even though he was only six going on seven years old, Oliver knew his monsters inside and out.

   Their father in the space of a brief second hadn’t seen anything but agreed to go back.

   “Let’s go see if we can help or he’ll kill himself on that highway,” he said. “If he tries walking across it, he’ll also cause trouble. Folks will smash into each other trying to avoid him.”

   They circled back and pulled off on the shoulder of the highway. Oliver jumped out of the Jeep and disappeared into the weeds. He made the universal monster sign of peace and Orange Eyes let him get closer. Emma could see him looking down and nodding. Finally, Oliver and Orange Eyes walked back to the car.

   “He just needs to get across to the cemetery,” Oliver told his dad. “That’s where he lived for a long time. He wants to go back home.”

   Oliver’s father lowered all the seats except his and Orange Eyes was able to lay flat, his legs sticking out the open hatch. Oliver and Emma sat on his chest and hung on to his chest hair. He smelled like onions, asparagus, and especially cabbage.

   “Let’s make this fast before we get stopped by the police,” their father said, push-buttoning all the windows open. Fresh air rushed in. Stinky cabbage air rushed out. “The cops don’t need to see this. They would have to write a new law and we don’t need any more laws for every little thing.”

   They got off the highway, went down Denison, turned right at West 25^th St.and another right into the cemetery. They drove past the Gatehouse Offices into the heart of the graveyard, coming to a stop in a spot dark as pitch. Orange Eyes wiggled his way out of the Jeep. He looked around and inhaled deeply. His eyes lit up and Oliver Emma and their dad stepped away. Orange Eyes coaxed them back and told them in monster talk that he liked the air. It wasn’t the same as when he lived there. It was cleaner than it had been mid-century. Even the river wasn’t catching fire anymore.

   They watched him lope away, waving goodbye over his shoulder, looking for the hidden entrance to the underground tunnel he had once called home.

    “I hope he finds his old place before he runs into anybody,” their dad said once they were back on the highway on their way home. “He’s not some small fry. If somebody bumps into that monster, they might turn into worm food just at the sight of him.”

   “I’ll tell you what’s a monster, dad,” Emma said.

   “What’s that bunny?”

   “My piano screaming the minute I sit down at the keyboard to practice.”

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.”

“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

   Godzilla and his grandson Goo Goo Godzilla looked out over the horizon of the Caribbean Sea and leaning on their elbows lay down on the warm sand. The sun was rising big and bright all shades of yellow. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There wasn’t a snake in the grass anywhere. The coast was clear.

   “The secret to a great morning is watching the sunrise,” Godzilla said.

   They were on the uninhabited island of Chacachacare. It had long ago been named Caracol by Christopher Columbus, which means snail in Spanish. It is part of the Bocas Islands spread out between Trinidad and Venezuela. It has an automated lighthouse along with a radar dish. It was where nuns once nursed lepers. 

   It was also where Godzilla battled tooth and nail and beat the hell out of Anguirus before Goo Goo was born. Since then, nobody wanted to go there anymore. Some Bocas islanders said the ghost of Anguirus roamed the land at night, complaining it hadn’t been a fair fight.

   Goo Goo yawned and stretched. They had been laying around in the sun for a week. It was their last day of vacation in the tropics. Godzilla was planning on flying east to visit his archenemy and best friend King Kong on Skull Island. Goo Goo was planning on flying to Perry, Ohio to visit his friends Oliver and Emma, and then taking off for home. Japan was home.

   “It’s been a blast, pops,” he said.

   “I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” Godzilla grumbled.

   They didn’t have any packing to do or travel arrangements to make so they stayed sand bound until the afternoon, loafing and snoozing all the while, snorting and farting in their sleep. When the time came to go Godzilla unleashed a mighty bellow of fire and rocketed up into the sky. Outside a small circle of friends few knew that the Godzilla’s could fly. He wagged his tail goodbye. Goo Goo got airborne, too, and headed north.

   He landed in Oliver’s backyard, which butted up to a wide field where there was a small evangelical church and a 140-foot-high cell phone tower. That’s an eyesore, Goo Goo thought, eyeballing the tower. He wasn’t as tall as it was, but he was getting there.

   After high fives Oliver and Goo Goo caught up, sat down to orange juice and PB&J, and took a nap. After they woke up Goo Goo asked Oliver if he wanted to go for a ride to see the sights. Emma was off somewhere with their friend Tommy One Shoe.

   “You bet I do, big fella,” Oliver said.

   “Bundle up, buddy, it’s cold up there.”

   Oliver tucked himself into the armored scales covering Goo Goo’s second brain, where his tail was attached, and they blasted off. Looking for warmer air Goo Goo headed south. He turned right when they got to Tennessee, planning on looping across Oklahoma before heading back to Ohio. While they were surveying OK Land, Goo Goo noticed an immense gathering at the Tulsa Fairgrounds. He swooped lower to get a better look.

   It was the Tulsa Arms Show, the biggest baddest show in the world with over 4,000 vendors inside an 11-acre air-conditioned auditorium. The carnival featured old and modern guns, flintlocks and repeaters, Glock troublemakers and Colt Peacemakers. American flags flapped all over the place. Posters for “MAGA” were everywhere. “Jesus Saves” was everywhere. It was a super-duper spectacle.

   Goo Goo didn’t like guns. None of the Godzilla clan did, even though pulling the trigger was useless against them. It was a personal thing with the monsters. Wherever Goo Goo landed in the civilized world men and women always came running, and when they saw him, started bellowing and blazing away. The bullets ricocheted off him like peas. Goo Goo was never not annoyed about it, although it would take a nuclear bomb to knock him off his feet. 

   When he and Oliver landed at the firearms fair a tall man shaking his little fist ran at them firing a state-of-the-art AR15. His back pockets were full of hundred-dollar bills. Goo Goo picked him up and tossed him into a garbage dumpster. He used the AR15 as a toothpick before chucking it aside. The man popped up covered in old grease and new filth.

   “I’m Wayne LaPierre,” he shouted. “I run the National Rifle Association and you’re going to pay for this! I’ve shot and killed 10,000-pound elephants, you big un-American oaf.” Goo Goo didn’t like that. Whatever happened to southern hospitality? He wasn’t an oaf and elephants weren’t dangerous unless you messed with them. All they wanted to do was find and eat their 200 pounds of food a day.

   “You’re more like Wayne Pepe le Pew in my book,” Goo Goo said. When even more mad men and women wearing NRA badges rushed him shooting their guns, he tossed them into the dumpster, too. It was a mess in there. The rats munching on leftovers jumped ship and ran away as fast as they could.

   “I’ll show them about some guns,” Goo Goo muttered.

   He flew off towards Japan, the dumpster firmly in his grip. He forgot all about Oliver for the moment. When he landed in Godzilla Town, he turned the dumpster upside down and everybody fell out. Goo Goo herded them towards the Museum of Peashooters. It was where many of the weapons used against the Godzilla’s were on display. There were handguns, shotguns, machine guns, grenades, mortars, recoilless rifles, flamethrowers, artillery, more artillery, rocket launchers, tanks, and jet fighters. None of them had ever made a dent.

   Oliver peeked out from under Goo Goo’s tail. He was seeing more sights than he had bargained for. 

   “I’ve never seen so many guns in my life, not even on TV,” Oliver tapped out in Morse code on the giant reptile’s second brain. It was how all monsters talked to each other.

   “How many guns do you have?” Goo Goo asked.

   “I don’t have any,” Oliver said.

   “How do fight monsters if you don’t shoot them?”

   “I use negotiation, persuasion, coercion, hypnosis, sleight of hand, bushwhacking, booby traps, a knock on the head, and if worse comes to worse, my friend the honey badger in the back woods gives me a hand.”

   “Honey badger? What can a honey badger do?”

   “Honey badgers eat poisonous snakes before breakfast. They can do anything because they’re not afraid of anything. Once he has got you in his sights, it’s every man for himself.”

   “I could squash him with my little toe,” Goo Goo said.

   “I wouldn’t try it if I were you,” Oliver said, a lopsided grin on his face. “The honey badger don’t care.”

   Goo Goo made a mental note to find out more about the beasts. There was no sense in tempting fate. Maybe one of his kith and kin had run into honey badgers and knew what their secret powers were. Oliver was listening in on Goo Goo’s brain. “No secrets,” he tapped out. “They don’t have any weaknesses, either.”

   After touring the museum Oliver said he had to go home. His mother and father would be worried. He was only seven years old, after all. Goo Goo frog marched the NRA mob back to the garbage dumpster. They climbed in, complaining. When Wayne LaPierre hesitated, Goo Goo gave him a kick, sending him flying. He landed in the dumpster on his silky as a sow’s butt. Goo Goo slammed the lid shut because the dumpster smelled so bad.

   “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

   Halfway back to the USA he got sick and tired of the NRA loose cannons banging and hollering inside the dumpster. He dropped it on Pitcairn Island, a God-forsaken volcanic hunk of limestone about 1,000 miles east of Tahiti. “I should have dropped them off at the Ninth Circle of Hell,” Goo Goo thought.

   He and Oliver were back in Perry in record time. The evening was a sweet happening on the shores of Lake Erie. A refreshing breeze was blowing from the west. “See you later, old buddy,” Oliver said. His sister Emma came running with a hot dog in one hand and pink lemonade in the other. She waved to Goo Goo with her foot. He fired up his atomic breath, winked and waved so long muchacho, and hit the road, the sky gone pretty as a postcard in the sunset. 

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

   Sammy wasn’t all in about living in a sewer but what could he do? He was too big by far to live out in the open. Trying that when he was a youngster almost cost him his life. Nobody ever said a kind word to him. They called him a yellow dog. Whenever they spotted him, they tried to chop him up, starting with his head.

   He was a yellow snake, born and bred in muck. Sammy grew up in a sewer, spent the best years of his life in a sewer, and expected to retire in a sewer. At least, until it all went wrong. In the end, home was wherever he lay his scales down.

   His relatives soaked up the sun, but the sun gave him heatstroke. He had lukewarm blood in his veins and shadows were warm enough for him. Other snakes ate eggs mice frogs and birds, but he was a big guy and needed big food. He lived on rats and rabbits and lost possums. He had teeth, but never chewed. He swallowed breakfast, lunch, and dinner all at once. He used his teeth for grabbing whatever was on the menu.

   His favorite was garbage rats, who were plump and delicious and satisfied his appetite, but then new-style plastic garbage cans started popping up. They were the kind that critters couldn’t get into, and the rats started to get smaller and smaller. His dinner table got more and more bare.

   He was in a bad way in another way. The more houses there were in Perry, Ohio the more crap came his way. He started seeing things in the sewer he had never seen before and never wanted to see again. Then his homestead came under attack.

   It started in the middle of April, when he woke up one day to rumbling and grumbling. The ground shook slightly. After the noise petered out, he slithered upwards until he poked his head through the grate in his attic and took a look around.

   “Holy smokes,” he hissed.

   There was a backhoe with a shovel on the front and a hoe on the back. There was a loader used to move asphalt, debris, dirt, gravel, and rock. There were a bulldozer and two humongous dump trucks. A trencher was being moved into place to dig trenches.

   There were concrete sewer sections being unloaded by a crane from a flatbed truck. New drainage was being created to collect sewage and stormwater from everybody’s houses, and the catch basins in the streets, as well, connecting to trunk sewers taking it all to a wastewater treatment plant.

   Sammy could tell the men in their green vests meant business. He didn’t like it, not one bit. What they were up to would put him out of house and home. He didn’t want to move out. He didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of life and death either. His twenty-foot-long cousin in Florida had been hooked by a plumber working on a street pipe and drain. When push came to shove the plumber called in the artillery and that was the end of his cousin.

  It was in the middle of that night that he crept out of his sewer and went to work. Even though he didn’t have arms or legs, he moved easily. He had a long spine with more than 400 ribs attached to it. The muscles connected to the ribs were what made him able to crawl, climb, and swim. His belly scales gripped the ground. He was so wide he could push on both sides of himself at the same time. He wasn’t as fast as the black mamba, who held all the gold medals in the speed events, but he was plenty fast enough.

   He went at the tires on the loaders and dump trucks, but even though his fangs were as big as could be, he couldn’t puncture the thick rubber. Frustrated, he started flattening any tire he could find. By the time he was done more than two dozen cars and pickups parked outside for the night had one or more flat tires. He slunk home with a bad taste in his mouth.

   When Oliver’s father tried to drive to work in the morning, he discovered both rear tires on his Jeep Cherokee were flat as flounders. “Grrrrr,” he growled. He only had one spare. When he called the tire store, he told them he thought it was vandalism.

   Oliver was already in the driveway with his magnifying glass. He had a hunch there was more to the story than hooligans. When he examined the tires, he knew he was right.

   “Dad, those punctures were made by the fangs of a big sewer snake.” He showed his father the distinctive bite marks. 

   “I thought the wildlife removal folks had gotten rid of all of them years ago,” his father said.

   “Maybe he was small, nobody noticed him, and he got left behind,” Oliver said.

   “How big do you think he is now?” his father asked. 

   “If he’s as big as I think he is, he’s gigantic.”

   “He has got to go. There are too many families and kids and pets around here for it to be safe.”

   “I have a plan,” Oliver said.

   It had to wait, though. He and Emma gulped down breakfast and jumped on the school bus. It was the last day of school before summer started for real. Emma was finishing third grade and Oliver was finishing first grade. Emma was Oliver’s monster hunting right-hand man. It was only after they got home that they were able to put their plan to work.

   First, they went to see their friend the honey badger who lived in the woods behind their house. The honey badger wasn’t a snake charmer. He had once duked it out with a puff adder, one of the deadliest crawlers in the world. Its venom melts human flesh. A half-dozen adder bites made him groggy so after he put the snake out of commission, he took a nap. He woke up refreshed. The fangs that cook life and limb could do nothing against his tough as nails body.

   “I’m your man,” he said in a high-pitched squeal-rattle after Oliver explained the plan.

   Oliver and Emma knew the sewer snake liked to lay out in the open at sunset, soaking up the mild dusky rays. They knew the spot because they always avoided it at that time of day. They quietly hid behind an old pin oak. When the snake arrived and curled up, they waited some more until he was good and drowsy.

   By the time the snake knew what was happening, Oliver and Emma were in front of him explaining he had to get out of town. When he protested, The honey badger, sneaking up from behind, clamped his jaws onto his rear end and started pulling. There was nothing the snake could do because everything he tried failed. His poisonous fangs were useless. He flailed this way and that. He curled himself round and round the badger and squeezed with all his might.

   The honey badger ignored everything he tried and dragged him to Oliver’s Monster Capture truck. When the snake complained he let loose a rattle-roar. Once the snake was under lock and key Oliver ran to find his father. When his father saw the sewer snake, he took two steps back.

   “Holy cow, that thing is big!”

   He got behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee. The honey badger joined them in the passenger seat, and they drove to Elderwood in East Cleveland. Elderwood was once a happy community full of life and laughter. Over the years it became a run-down shadow of itself. Almost everybody moved out. Now there were few signs of life except for squatters and drug addicts.

   When they opened the back of the Monster Capture truck, Oliver didn’t have to say a word. The snake wiggled out fast and headed for the nearest sewer. The dope fiends didn’t know it, but they had a new neighbor.

   Back home in Perry, the honey badger tipped his hat and trotted back into the forest.

   Over dinner, after his father explained where they had taken the snake, Oliver said, “It was coming up snake eyes for him here, but a moldy old neighborhood with lots of leftover sewers sounds like just the place for him.”

   “They are always shedding their skin, becoming new snakes, so I think he’ll be OK in his new home,” Emma said, taking a day’s work well done large bite of her stove-top grilled cauliflower and chicken.

   “Yum,” she said, swallowing it whole.

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.”

“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