Zenbator

Missy, Brian and Jimmy along with Keith were a proper coterie right out of the box, no trials necessary. All were in the fourth grade, which in rural Kentucky in 1981 meant that they kept the same teacher for reading, writing and math. That is where they met, memorized state capitals, did long division and learned to write in cursive. In the cafeteria over hot dogs or pizza burgers and a mini, dampened cardboard carton of chocolate milk that often opened to a puckered beak they gushed over horror movies.

Missy, Brian and Jimmy saw them all, even the new ones at the theater that were R-rated. Keith’s parents wouldn’t let him watch more than a Scooby Doo cartoon since he’d stayed up late on a Saturday to see Chiller Theatre and caught Deathdream in its entirety instead of the cordial, expected Godzilla movie or Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Dire nightmares followed, or so he was told; Keith didn’t remember them.

As to how his best friends were able in single digits to see all of the latest and greatest zombies, vampires, aliens and ax-wielding psychos he neither knew nor cared. Maybe they went with their moms and dads or had cool older cousins who passed for guardians. Could be they snuck in after grabbing a pass to The Fox and the Hound. Didn’t matter to Keith, he knew they were telling the truth (or hanging out making up spooky stories without him) and he found their enthusiasm for the subject electric and contagious.

The lunch bell rang and Keith stood outside the doors to the cafeteria. He saw through their Georgian wired glass that the rest of his gang was inside. He was late from visiting his locker to grab a toy he’d snuck from home to show them. It was a battery-operated handheld game called Space Invader built by Entex to mimic the popular arcade game with a similar name. Keith thought it played better. Still he couldn’t help taking a moment to cross his corrected eyes at the crosshatched steel lines embedded in the safety glass, mis-focusing to cause the lines to fuse incorrectly. It was a trick that worked as well on chainlink fences and shopping carts. To Keith it emulated sliding into a different dimension.

A couple of fifth graders conducting an intense philosophical debate pushed past him, “You have to be either a cat person or a dog person.”

“Dogs and cats aren’t opposites!”

“Then why do they hate each other?”

As they thrust open the doors and rambled inside, Keith was hit with a pungent aroma and could tell immediately that pizza burgers were on the menu again. He liked pizza. He liked burgers. These didn’t taste like either, more like sloppy joes with toe cheese melted over the top. But he was hungry and at least they tasted better than they smelled.

Long, rectangle cafeteria bench tables in rows filled the room that also functioned as a gym and an auditorium. They were loaded with kids munching, yakking and clanking their silverware and between the sheet vinyl tile and high, open ceiling happened a cavernous clamor that imitated a drunken raccoon train station. At the opposite end from the doors leading in from the hallway were two security doors that opened to the playground. The service area was tucked to the left with a moderate line of ten or twenty students extending into the dining area. To the right there was a wooden stage set in the wall that kept a single microphone on a stand wired to an amplifier sitting under a hanging multicolored party banner declaring WELCOME BACK FAIRFIELD ELEMENTARY GRADES 1–6. Keith pondered that first graders had only just arrived and decided most probably couldn’t read the sign yet anyway. He patted the game in his pocket and got in line for his feet-za burger and chips.

Missy always packed her lunch and was wearing a red plaid cowboy shirt. The color complimented her hair and it had snap buttons that looked like pearls. She was pulling a clear, makeshift baggie made from a square of plastic wrap secured with a rubber band appearing to contain some dark red goo out of her brown bag when Keith planted his tray and took the empty seat across from her, next to Jimmy.

Keith was curious and asked, “What’s that?”

“Cat’s blood,” she replied.

“Better not Jonesy,” Brian said and bit from his open-faced sandwich. Brian sat next to Missy, liked to wear Polo shirts and was as large for his age as she was tall and slender for her age. Today he was wearing yellow, blue and white horizontal stripes. Jimmy in bluejeans and an AC/DC Back in Black tee stabbed at the pasty tomato-meat mixture on his styrofoam plate with his plastic fork like it scratched his records.

Keith recalled Jonesy was the kitty in the movie where the alien explodes from an astronaut’s chest. Imagine what that must look like! How does a whole alien even fit in a chest? Certainly Missy wasn’t bleeding cats. She had a cat. Most likely it was only ketchup.

Jimmy put down his fork, picked up a chip, snapped it into two pieces and said, “So my uncle Dennis took me to see An American Werewolf in London,” and chomped. It turned out that Brian caught it also, having donated three weeks’ allowances to a teenage pair on a date who didn’t mind propping a door by the screen open so he could slip in from the lot undetected. Tales of monster attacks and rotting, talking corpses and Nazi werewolves machine-gunning a family watching television in their den followed as Jimmy and Brian took turns with narration, Missy snacked on cold tater tots dipped in cat’s blood and Keith attended slack-jawed. He wasn’t sure what a Nazi was, but it sounded like the last kind of person you’d want becoming a werewolf.

The bell called them all outside for recess. Mrs. Harding escorted the lower three grades. The upper three escorted themselves. Only Keith had Mrs. Harding as a teacher. She was younger than the rest and always in a wrap dress with pretty flowers on it and low block heels one could hear coming if one were sketching fanged beasties and wild-eyed skulls while one ought to be diagramming sentences.

It was a bright and breezy Kentucky day in early September and the four trailed their schoolmates through the security doors and crossed the blacktop to settle at the Dirt Pile. In the gym that was recently a cafeteria, benches were being cached and steel folding chairs set for an assembly.

The Dirt Pile was a real, true home away from home. Sure you had your hopscotch on the asphalt, or a basketball hoop if that’s your thing or the see-saws by the swings and slide. If you felt like a monkey, Fairfield Elementary sported monkey bars, a monkey arch and a monkey tower. Keith liked walking over the arch and standing on top of the tower but that wasn’t allowed. You’d get the whistle for sure and maybe a turn in the Bad Chair (if not a paddling, at his age). Beyond the blacktop lay a field nigh a half an acre that was not fenced in. The lush lake of grass spread to a bent line of trees hugging the property and from the blacktop looked as tiny as plastic soldiers. Kids were permitted in the shallow end; venture too deep and hear the whistle but a few skips offshore endured a forty-foot-long fissure in the earth the width of a couple Big Wheels and around knee-deep (deeper at its midpoint, sloping to level at the tips).

Though surrounded by tickling bluegrass and moist, yielding ground the scar was bone-dry, barren and packed like sandstone. It resembled a canyon in miniature and had some straight walls, some angling inward forming pointy troughs and some discharging odd protrusions like roots or veins that zigzagged along the floor in illogical directions as if in search of something.

Missy flitted about close to the edge practicing steps and turns for a dance recital. The boys were hunkered in the depression huddling to keep sunlight off of the game screen as Keith gave pointers (wipe out entire rows as you can, stick near the sides, don’t shoot your own shield) to no avail. The gang were joined by an unofficial, fifth member, Russell. Some other kids sprinkled the rift playing with Hot Wheels or privately avoiding the mob of the playground.

Russell didn’t share the same interests as the group but shared in being interesting. His family operated a farm and each morning—including those before school—he helped to scoop manure, toss hay and fill water pails for horses, cows, goats and chickens and he would not need to tell anyone in his class for them to know. He did wash up before leaving, but the sweet, acrid barnyard smell, which Russell didn’t mind and associated with home, got into everything on a farm and bristles of hay clung to his clothes like scales on fish.

“Can I giver a try?” he asked.

Jimmy was on a roll. “I’m on a roll!”

Brian bumped Jimmy sending a ripple through the round but Jimmy didn’t choke. “Quit it!”

Missy stopped twirling. “Let him have it!”

“I almost beat it.”

“There are infinite levels. It just gets faster and stupider,” said Keith.

That shook Jimmy’s confidence and his red blip took a final blow. He flashed puppy dog eyes at Keith, “One more.”

Missy said, “Brian, mangle Jimmy,” and Brian slugged Jimmy on the arm, allowing Keith to swipe the game, which he passed to Russell who had to lean back as Jimmy made a pretty big show of making it look like he intended to sock Brian, who reacted merely by smirking into a camera that wasn’t there.

From the blacktop and playground behind the school where she patrolled observing students with her chrome whistle at the ready Mrs. Harding saw the Dirt Pile well and spied the spat. She knew the covey and knew that they were tight. She couldn’t hear them but no one seemed hurt, no one was making a break for the treeline and on her mind weighed a question of how to suggest to Principal Preston that although 3-2-1 Contact and The Electric Company were educational, television might not be something that the school should be relying on as a teaching tool. She’s fairly positive he’ll say it gives her a couple extra hours to grade papers and work on lesson plans for which she’d no smart response.

She forwent the goings-on at the Dirt Pile and focused her attention again on the main grounds. Her thoughts were louder than recess and it wasn’t until activity hushed around her that she broke from them and faced the field to find her young charges stolid and transfixed, gathered around the crack in the earth like it’d been dispensing test answers and free snack cakes.

Russell had been firing on all cylinders, clearing the first two boards quickly without losing one life. Keith couldn’t tell if he was a natural or’d been paying attention to the tips. There wasn’t anything complicated about it; mostly being nervous made it difficult. Keith customarily felt that the more blips he took out without taking a hit, then all the more he must have one coming. Russell had no such handicap. Russell was a stone-cold blip assassin and Brian, Jimmy and Keith encircled him observing with rapt admiration until Missy from her heightened position noticed something that the boys playing had not.

“There’s a monster in the Dirt Pile,” she said.

At first came no response except Brian let go a fart that sounded like a dog bark. It startled Keith and he said, “Scared me.”

“It kind of scared me, too,” said Brian.

Missy and Keith were the closest since they’d met at a birthday party where Keith had missed the donkey entirely and pinned the tail on the tree, inciting laughter and sending him to sob solo behind the house on a beaten porch swing. That’s where Missy found him in his tan corduroy pants and dress shirt quite resembling Luke Skywalker (if Luke Skywalker had worn glasses) and assured him that the kids weren’t laughing at him, they’d just found it funny and it didn’t matter what they thought anyway, and they became friends. She dropped into the crevice with the boys, put both her hands on Keith’s shoulders, squeezed then removed one to point at a particularly gnarly and angular rhizoid jutting like the leg from a sleeper into the hole. She said, “That is Frankenstein,” grabbed a Matchbox car and commenced carving at the sandy foot.

Keith and Brian took an interest. Jimmy and Russell broke away blast invaders. Only Jimmy thought to mention that Frankenstein was the doctor’s name, though they all knew it just as they knew that the monster existed in reality as Frankenstein—it simply was cooler that way. Brian thought vampires were more cooler than animated automatons and saw Dracula’s coffin in the Dirt Pile. Keith supposed a shred of plaid flannel jutting from one unholy lump could be stuck on a werewolf’s bloody claw…

Missy, Brian and Keith dug with a fervor usually reserved for Christmas morning or a new The Dukes of Hazzard. For only the pay of what minutes remained before the school bell sung them back inside, using toy cars, rocks and sticks they picked, pecked and poked at crusty blocks of dirt, rock and sand until it became its own game with the three fourth graders obliterating suspicious lumps one after another, verily transforming their pocket of the Dirt Pile into a dust bowl.

They barely noticed when other kids playing at the spot (excepting Jimmy and Russell in-the-zone) slid over and asked what was going on. Keith half-heard himself say, “We’re looking for monsters,” in a certified tone from a faraway place that must have made it an invitation because the local smattering picked up their own hunting implements, or simply used their hands, and started to help with the job.

The cloud of dust grew. Word got out. Like chickadees to sunflower seeds more kids followed from beyond the field and then from beyond the blacktop to become the first to pull a monster out of the Fairfield Dirt Pile. Jimmy and Russell had to relocate closer to the school to keep the screen on Keith’s game clean and it put the contraband electronic in clear view of Mrs. Harding if she’d happen to look in their direction.

Most importantly the exorbitant amount of added foot traffic in conjunction with the compounded pounding and ramshackle excavating had loosened an artifact from a wall in the Dirt Pile that had been semi-consciously working its way toward the surface since the last ice age. It was a hollowed-out knot of an oak tree the size of an adult fist, stained black inside and outside from a controlled burn and sealed with bitumen.

It held something and had popped out where Missy’d set events in motion attracting zero attention; there was too much dust in the air, and many creatures to unearth. By now every Fairfield Elementary student at the first recess of the new school year was either down in the trench cooperating with the dig or lining its edges in an erect, sedated stance like the trees watching over the field mumbling to each other and awaiting a stirring of supernatural activity.

Had anyone noticed the vessel it would’ve appeared as yet another arbitrary, dejected clump.

No one did.

Mrs. Puckett, an older teacher as most at Fairfield were, whom the children thought of as somewhere between mother age and grandmother age and kind although she had a resting scowl and liked to peer at you over the rim of her cat-eye glasses when she spoke at you and who dressed like an extra in Song of the South had just threaded a 16mm print of Song of the South into a projector now set up in the auditorium behind neat rows of little chairs all facing the stage when she heard Mrs. Harding’s whistle bleating.

That wasn’t somebody not listening; it sounded like they were in trouble or maybe hurt. There were no windows that looked into the yard, only a long, glazed concrete wall adorned with last year’s art show winners with the steel doors with the bars one pushes to open. Mrs. Puckett raced from the projector and opened one, drawing in a breeze with a faint smell of Japanese honeysuckle. The contrasting daylight dazzled her sight. When it stabilized she still couldn’t be sure what it was she was seeing.

There were no children playing on the playground. Pushing her glasses all the way onto her nose, from across the blacktop she witnessed a dense cloud of dust and a crowd of kids surrounding that blasted dent in the yard and her friend June toot-toot-tooting and grabbing children up out of the hole like there was a bobcat loose in it.

Suddenly June Harding slipped on something and fell out of view among the inverted wedge, the tall grass and the dispersing crowd. Mrs. Puckett shot from the doorway and headed for the Dirt Pile as quickly as her somewhere between mother- and grandmother-aged legs could carry her, praying that June was alright and thinking about all of the official requests she herself had submitted to have that thing filled in.

Neither Jimmy nor Russell heard Mrs. Harding’s thick shoes on the concrete clomping their way or police whistle. Russell was about to clear another board (Jimmy’d had a couple of turns; he plainly didn’t live as long) when she sailed past the two of them angling for Keith, the hub of the congregation. Jimmy snatched the game from Russell, turned it off and tucked it under his shirt deciding he’d be the one getting caught with it.

The artifact liberated from the earth that had remained so far undetected started to wriggle and kick like a Mexican jumping bean. On opposite sides of the dark knot, symbols of a shield and spiral appeared in smoldering, ghostly blue outlines as the trapped presence inside sensed the opportunity of a myriad to smash past the eroded seal and had at it. June Harding stepped over it unaware, got her hands on Keith and in a concerned manner begged him, “What are all y’all doing?”

Keith knew a voice of authority when he heard one but he was caught in a spell—Missy’s game had become an occupation, then a mission then ultimately a meditation. When he replied again, “Digging for monsters,” this time it carried an exasperated attitude of How’s this not obvious? that sent Mrs. Harding over the edge of restraint and she lifted him up, out of the pit and dragged him far enough back that he could see (for the first time) the cluster that they had caused. How many kids were there? Jeez, it looked like the whole school! It seemed less real than the monster hunting, but this was real.

Mrs. Harding told Keith to park it and returned to the Dirt Pile.

The oak knot jumped to the left.

Jimmy thought he was seeing something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Russell considered the cows that entered his parlor every day for milking at the exact same times and in the exact same positions on the string without being told. Both watched as Mrs. Harding tapped Missy next, then Brian and made them stand with Keith beyond the congregation.

The knot jerked right.

Cecilia Puckett appeared in the doorway connecting the school and the blacktop.

Clarence, the shortest fourth grader who stuck thumbtacks in the soles of his shoes because he was learning to tap was digging for an imaginary blob when removed. Mrs. Harding snagged Beth next, the third grader who liked to say that her parents had had her IQ tested and that she wasn’t a genius but close, and who’d abandoned her mummy to scan for spirits in the ethereal powder. Sharon didn’t care what they found as long as it was not the floating boy from Salem’s Lot. Pete had a line on a zombie and was being careful not to get bit. When Mrs. Harding put her hand on him he screamed.

Jimmy and Russell stood up. Jimmy lifted his arms and ran his fingers through his shaggy hair. Keith’s video game fell out of his shirt without him noticing and Russell didn’t see it either because he was watching a glowing ball, or rock, or something hopping back and forth in the pother among the Keds and KangaROOS. Who’d brought that thing? They’re going to kill its batteries…

June was sure no harm’d been meant; the situation was weird and it’d come out of nowhere is all. She was being bellicose with the older kids and frightening the younger ones and resigned herself to calm down and make a general announcement to everyone to break it up, which many had already begun to do.

Inside the unearthed phylactery where there wasn’t the room for a pack of cigarettes, a quasiparticle with the effective mass of a cigarette ash (a lot) tethered to an adjacent plane made of a different kind of matter and operating under direct orders had been using its teensy body to trace the shape of an arrowhead in spacetime at such a speed as to render it tacitly solid, levitating itself and repeatedly stabbing the pointy end of its arrowhead shape into the brittle seal that along with the container having been formerly pressed into hard, hallowed ground had been aiding in barring the entity from its reentry into this world.

Runs at the wearing barrier were having little effect. Power inside the oaken prison was limited, but if getting out took it another ten thousand years (or so) that was fine, the dot had a job to do and it would do it. Printing the arrowhead shape again, generating a lean barrier in midair the way a turning fan makes an impasse betwixt its spun blades the racing point set its mimic for another collision with the softest part of its prison just as outside the shell Mrs. Harding turned in the direction of the asphalt, where from she’d chosen to make her plea to the remaining stragglers.

She’d’ve caught Russell pointing at the ground near her feet had she not first spotted Space Invader lying in the dirt at Jimmy’s. Whatever else was afoot, handheld video games were absolutely not allowed on school property.

June Harding instinctively grabbed her whistle and took a stride toward the two boys. The vessel lurched and twisted to a stop in the shadow of her left foot, which came down on top of it and by the providence of her weight plus the sharp, stacked leather heel of her shoe it got its brittle, cracking orifice pierced. This caught and kinked June’s ankle, sent her ass over teakettle and provided the agent inside with a means of escape. The lit-up shield and spiral on the exterior of the oak knot shifted their colors from spectral blue to cherry red and began flashing.

From the dandelions where they stood several yards back, Missy, Brian and Keith watched Mrs. Harding remove kids and break up the flock around the massive divot. Keith knew he was cooked. She’d find the game, tell it was his from his name on it and the trouble he got in at school wouldn’t be half of what awaited him at home.

Brian said, “You know what’s really messed up?”

“The Mr. Yuk commercial.” Missy.

Brian let out a fake yell. Keith turned from the Dirt Pile and said, “As soon as I hear that song start I run behind the couch.”

Brian to Keith, “You hid behind the couch when you thought there was a ghost in my basement.”

“I knew that was you screwing around.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Your evidence was ‘get out or I’ll kill you’ scrawled with a leaky pen on an old piece of cardboard and signed ‘The Ghost.’”

Missy laughed and said, “I remember that. You hung all those old bedsheets and plastic drapes up and tried to make it a haunted house, but it was just a bunch of your dad’s spooky junk. Jimmy had that rock that barely stood up he was practicing telekinesis on.”

They all started laughing and missed Mrs. Harding take her tumble but not Mrs. Puckett booking across the flat like it was a downhill slope. She arrived at the pit and helped Mrs. Harding to her feet. The trio watched them exchange words that culminated in Mrs. Harding pointing their direction.

Mrs. Harding bent and picked an object off of the ground near Jimmy and the two teachers directed everyone left at the sandbox to the back doors to await the bell. Mrs. Harding escorted Jimmy and Russell personally. Keith thought, That’s it, I’m not getting it back and they’re gonna hate me forever. His belly felt like it was getting sucked into a drain.

“Anyways I was going to say what’s messed up is if starving kids in China need my dinner I don’t know why they can’t have it. Ain’t me telling ‘em no.”

Keith stared at Brian. He appreciated his attempt to distract him from the trauma of losing Space Invader but also thought that he might be on to something. Keith asked, “How much stamps does a fish stick take?” and looked to Missy for a clue. Missy was looking in the direction of the Dirt Pile, where only Mrs. Puckett now stood. Well, her body dressed in its darkly colored pantsuit with laced collar was over there—her noggin was heading their way.

Missy said, “Guys?”

Brian didn’t have an exact answer. “Whatever it is you’ll probably double that for international.”

“Guys…”

The boys turned and everyone met the head of Mrs. Puckett bobbing in the air mere inches away yet connected to the rest of her form by a thinly stretched neck the length of several lunch tables. Slimy, gray droplets seeped through cracks in her neck and head and fell to the grass. The head, cartoonish and horrible ascended, intensely scrutinized the three of them then opened its mouth far too wide. The bell indicating the end of recess rang from it. It was loud as hell from their close proximity and Missy, Brian and Keith were forced to cover their ears.

It went on longer than it should’ve and was beginning to feel less like a change of period and more like a test of the Emergency Broadcast System when the ringing stopped and the head hollered with a pinched but powerful resonance, “WE HAVE TO GET IT OFF OF THE PLANET!” and spit. Hundreds of wee lights broke from behind its glasses and set to guiding the dollops of gray ooze in the grass back to the Dirt Pile and the body section. They worked their way up the body and along the neck to the head, filling in and repairing the cracks as they went. Seeming to feel that the ooze had gotten the gist, the plethora of sparkles took off.

Missy, who’d been visited on and off by a ghost without any head or hands around her home since she was four (and who she presumed she might be motivated to help in some way if only they were able to communicate) found herself amused by the colorful experience.

Keith threw up lunch on his Zips by Stride Rite.

Brian said, “We do?”

Inside the cafetorium, Principal Wallace Preston in a tweed sport coat with elbow patches was onstage protracting a 15-foot canvas screen on a stand. The overhead fluorescent lights were turned off and the stage border lights on, basking the entering throng of children in amber and illuminating a booger of pizza burger caught in his mustache.

June Harding halted the crowd at the front of the stage. Awaiting faculty instructed grades 1–3 to take seats for a movie. Grades 4–6, not counting Jimmy and Russell, moseyed out the opposing glass doors, into the main hall and on to their classes.

June climbed the short stack of steps beside the stage and approached her boss failing to hide a slight limp and wince.

Russell heard him ask her, “What happened?” as she got between them, facing Mr. Preston though not entirely concealing his considerable size. Russell watched her pull something from her dress pocket and pass it his way. Neither boy could’ve seen what it was from their angle and Jimmy was glaring at the thing on Preston’s face anyway, until he laughed and wiped it off indicating in the direction of the main entry. Russell didn’t curse and came from a family that didn’t curse but he’d heard Jimmy curse and in the moment he was thinking it.

Eventually the principal leaned over her shoulder, saw the boys and said, “You two go to my office and wait for me. Don’t touch anything,” then added, “Fold your hands.” To June, “Better go see Anita in the Health Room. We’ll get a sub for your next couple of periods.”

She did hurt. Mostly she thought she’d earned a rest and so the trio withdrew and ambled into the hallway together; Jimmy and Russell making a right toward Mr. Preston’s office and Mrs. Harding going left to hobble toward the nurse’s, which will be triage in 20 minutes (relatively speaking).

Wallace Preston stepped up to the microphone, flipped it on with a thonk from the amplifier and cheered into it, “Girls and boys, do we have a treat planned for you!”

Puckett’s head retracted to the Dirt Pile to undulate in the vicinity of her body and the remedial ooze. The air outside was changing. As Missy, Brian and Keith watched the last of their schoolmates enter the building, the clouds rolling high over the Fairfield Elementary Dirt Pile grew heavy and dark, and a smell crept in that wasn’t bluegrass or honeysuckle. It was sour and metallic and reminded Brian and Keith of the way pennies taste and Missy of blood.

The double security doors to the school clanked shut and the sound echoed across the playground prompting Mrs. Puckett’s head again to yell—this time at no one in particular, “WE HAVE TO GET IT OFF OF THE PLANET!” then drop to the ground and writhe toward the trio in a serpentine motion on its tether of neck. It slid to a stop at Brian’s feet and twisted to look up at him with one blue eyeball and one red eyeball flaring up her specs like Kojak lights and whispered, “We have to get it off of the planet…”

Keith decided that they should get inside. “We need to go in.”

Missy said, “We have to get it off the planet.”

“Get what?!” Brian queried.

“FIRST YOU!” it screeched. The long neck rose like the rod of an angler readying to unload and lifted the head so that it dangled eye-level before the kids, albeit upside down. Puckett’s topsy-turvy visage rocked this a-way then that a-way and continued the pendular motion, her 3D glasses now swirling enigmatic new hues. The sky over the Dirt Pile crackled and sparkled like a colossal fleece blanket in dry air wiped by an unseen hand. A rumbling heard from behind the kids was taken as thunder, though was not thunder.

The neck retreated again pulling Puckett’s head with it. Its swaying pattern and weird lights had ignited a calm in Missy and Brain who did not notice that a force was nudging them forward. With or without lifting their heels, they inched bit by bit closer to the rip in the earth and Cecilia Puckett’s animated torso.

Keith did notice. Keith was not feeling calm. Keith felt like he’d caught cobwebs in his face by walking between tree branches or opened a pack of KISS cards and found his gum stiff and dry as balsa wood. Keith was downright irritated and he reached out in an effort to hold back the other two, even as he knew that he too was being nudged. With the arm not fruitlessly offering protection to two of his best friends he reached behind him and felt familiar, chilly metal bars. He released Missy and Brian and turned.

The wee lights had come back dragging the monkey bars, arch and tower from the playground with them leaving a trail of torn asphalt and upturned terrain in their wake. Keith had to keep stepping backward as he observed steel pipes sparking, squeezing, bending and fusing into what could be a net (or a cage) amid a vast fluff of minute, twinkling dots. The structure made its distance and stopped but continued to transfigure itself. Keith figured that if it pushed them any farther they’d be in the hole.

He didn’t wish to turn back around.

In the principal’s office crowded with filing cabinets topped by family photos and smelling like leather, cedar paneling and paperwork, Jimmy sat in Mr. Preston’s chair at his desk and eyeballed a side of chips left on an old lunch plate. Russell sat in one of the two chairs opposite the principal’s seat where they should both have been sitting. Jimmy looked at Russell and said, “I can’t believe he eats the same thing we eat.”

Russell said, “That lunch lady puts too much on. There’s pizza burger on the floor all the way from here to the gym. Keith is going to kill us.”

“Because Preston don’t know how to eat?”

“Because Mrs. Harding found his game and turned it in!”

“Mrs. Harding didn’t find shit.”

“Jimmy, I saw her give it to him when they were up talking on the stage.”

“My good man, I’m sure you are mistaken,” he said to Russell and whipped the handheld Space Invader out from under his shirt and set it on the desk. Russell furrowed his brow, looking very much like a grownup as he did so. Jimmy said, “I saw it on the ground right after she tripped.”

“But… I… then what did…”

“Wanna play?”

Russell cancelled his train of thought to hastily reply, “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” then Jimmy lit it up anyway.

Keith spun to face the Dirt Pile, though saw neither it nor the thing that had taken over and warped Mrs. Puckett’s body because his eyes were closed. He could hear it mumbling its edictal mantra and occasionally rummaging about the dirt floor out front brushing rocks aside using probably either her pilgrim shoes or effulgent head. To his right he heard Missy and Brian panting in unison and droning, “We have to get it off the planet, we have to get it off the planet,” softly at first, then louder then much louder until finally directly into his ear.

He squeezed his eyes tight enough to give himself a headache. The chanting stopped and Missy tittered, “You can open your eyes. She’s not paying attention to us.”

Missy said and so he did, regardless of his certainty that the thing’s avoidance was a temporary condition. The three stood in a triangle formation at the border of the pit. Fragments of jungle gym enclosed the Dirt Pile and themselves in every direction, interlaced in patchwork grids whose distances were difficult to gauge and geometry resembled something like an igloo and something like a roller coaster track trying to eat itself.

Three circular openings too small to crawl through were situated over their heads in the grid like points on a triangle and a trampoline-sized circle over and across the pit like a television set tuned to reality displayed the magnified view of a doe and her fawn sunning in the grass halfway between them and the observing trees.

In the clearing where the deer were the weather was as it had been all day—bright and beautiful. Meanwhile the three could see through the narrow gaps in the barred structure debris and clouds in icky pinks and greens swirling and churning in the sky as if it were a washing machine full of milkshakes. Winds skirled. A mechanical hum emitted from overhead sounding as much from Earth as Mrs. Puckett’s gross body appeared to be.

Gray stuff continued dripping through cracks in her skin and returning to reintegrate themselves as her body traced the length of the giant rift to the school end and back without leaving it—goofy, disco head on spaghetti neck like a charmed cobra, scanning the location sometimes following and sometimes in the lead.

Once, the head glared in their direction and Brian muttered, “Don’t even say it.”

“Where’s the dingus?” it asked then went back on the prowl.

Keith looked at Missy and said, “Did she say dingus?” then to Brian, “Is that what we need to get off the planet?”

“We need to get the dingus off the planet.” Brian.

Missy said, “I don’t know what that means,” earning squints from the boys so adding, “I mean whose dingus… plus how?”

From yonder in the pit, “WE HAVE TO GET IT—”

“We know!!” the three shouted together and laughed about it. They found it difficult to stop laughing. From deep inside, sincere joy and wonder welled up in each of them and as they let it out it brought tears to their eyes.

The blanket in the sky excited another electric charge and the enveloping monkey fence answered with a transverse vibration like a wire plucked. The moaning of the engine or motor that hid above the clouds swelled twice as if to say all systems go. But all systems were not go.

Keith’s hand was a go. His fingers were fascinating. They did so much. He looked at Missy and saw her pupils were the size of tea cups. She smiled and asked him, “Does any of this seem strange to you?” He couldn’t discern. Keith wasn’t sure whether it was daytime or nighttime. Through the giant TV Brian watched Mommy Deer lick Baby Deer. It was bringing him more pleasure than the Scanners business going on with Mrs. Puckett (and going nowhere fast) and distracting him from the scary, purpling storm outside, his butterfly belly and the fact that they were missing The Bloodhound Gang.

Missy and Keith joined him, remarking how though only a hundred feet away the deer didn’t seem to acknowledge the tempest brewing or their Dirt Pile predicament at all! Neither the kids nor the deer noticed a shadowy bellend the diameter of a manhole cover protruding from the treeline just beyond the animals.

The Puckett thing drew up to the monitor at the kids’ end of the pit on its far side like a horse head and carriage. The head mostly reattached itself and Mrs. Puckett turned to face them and declared in her true voice, “This is set to be trickier without the dingus. We cannot accept imperfection. The beast has outlived its use,” then pointed at the TV.

Convinced that it meant cute, peaceful woodland critters, Missy shouted, “No way, Jose!” and took the Matchbox car from her pocket that she’d been using to hunt monsters and chucked it at the teacher creature, hit it square in the psychedelic spectacles, knocked them off and aggravated her melon into separating again and darting their way.

Keith stepped in front of Missy. Brian stepped in front of Keith and just as the head reached them Brian punched it in the mouth. It felt like he’d stuck his fist into a mound of green bean casserole.

The Disney movie for the 1^st through 3^rd graders was rolling and Principal Preston left them watching under the capable supervision of their teachers—minus one filling in for Mrs. Harding—plus a handful of lunch staff still clearing down to see to Jimmy and Russell. First he stopped at Ms. Dunn’s room where June was lying on a cot too small for her with her ankle on ice and propped up. She made a motion to get up and he made a gesture to stay put, exited and made his way down the hall to his office.

The classroom doors had narrow, rectangular windows built in. His office was situated on the corner of a T-junction and had its own window with venetian blinds he liked to leave open that were presently shut. He marked that, entered the room and said, “Jesus it smells like a barnyard in here… oh. Sorry Russell.”

Russell raised his arms as if to say it happens all the time. Both of the boys now sat in the chairs ahead of the desk, game tucked away. The principal twisted the blinds open and asked Jimmy if he’d been eating his chips. Jimmy said not without a pop. Mr. Preston told Jimmy having a pop on school grounds was cause for a whooping. Jimmy told Mr. Preston he didn’t mind a whooping as long as it was him who administered it and not one of the weak old lady teachers. Russell wished Jimmy’d shut up.

He stepped behind his desk, said, “Gentlemen, I’m going to ask you a question and I’d like the truth—does this belong to either of you?” He took the oak tree knot that had ascended from the depths of the Dirt Pile out of his suit coat pocket and held it up in the air. The flashing of its shield and spiral quickened.

Jimmy thought it looked super cool and wanted to ask what it was. He didn’t get the chance. Seeing it this close creeped Russell out (odd, considering he’d no problem removing camel crickets from the hayloft by hand) and he yelled, “That’s what Mrs. Harding slipped on!” and jumped like a horse hearing an air horn out of his chair, tipping it over.

Jimmy thought Russell’d flipped his lid and wanted to ask what’s the matter with him. He didn’t get the chance. Russell’s ambiguous panic and disgust spooked Mr. Preston into dropping the dingus like a hot potato, which hit his desk as the pulsing sigils flared red once more then froze in the on configuration because time in the room itself had froze.

In the cafetorium lit by the glow of Uncle Remus’s fireplace Uncle Remus in his cabin had explained to Johnny the meaning of a zip-a-dee-doo-dah day and was bursting into song, “Zip…” when the command of the continuatio interrupta swelling like a bubble from the ancient dingus on the principal’s desk spread through the room, stopped every procession of eventualities there and tore off to the playground.

Mrs. Puckett’s dripping, goober mouth held tight to Brian’s fist and tried to form the words here we go, look but they came out, “Eerie oh… MOOK!” The head led him across the Dirt Pile by its face to the television on the opposite side. Keith and Missy followed.

Letting go of Brian, Puckett snarled, “Hope that it makes it.”

The three glanced briefly at each other to verify no one had any clue what that meant (or what is even happening), then returned to the monitor. The static force punching into their dimension and disfiguring spacetime passed over the monkey cage without affecting it, or them, or the storm outside and advanced to within a yard of the deer, halted and idled in place suspending every blade of grass, dandelion puff, samara, sweat bee, grackle and blackbird within its realm like so many toothpicks in Kool-Aid ice cube popsicles.

From the deers’ perspective the view grew odd. Jimmy might’ve said it resembled a skipping record needle; reality was hiccuping.

The doe rose and snorted. The fawn lay flat and still. Out of the forest margin wriggled a coned head with a long, prolapsed mouth resembling the bell of a tuba connecting two murky beachballs on eyestalks guiding a hexapod the bulk of a short bus. It had black sclerites like samurai armor covering its back and sported footlong hairs like skinny blades that made coleslaw out of the edge line vegetation as it emerged. The front four legs were oversized human arms with tarsal hooks where hands should be. The hind set consisted of human legs turned backward, tall and wide as crabapple tree trunks with bristly, serrated feet. Fully pulling itself from the woods revealed a raised, plated tail section that drooped a slobbery stinger over its bulbous backside like an industrial crane hook.

The doe clocked it and held perfectly still. The monster didn’t move and didn’t make a sound. Without taking her eye off of it, she lifted one foreleg, waited briefly then stomped. The beast launched itself at the pair and landed on the fawn smearing it over the grass like a bug caught between a wiper and a windshield. Arresting its skid it rounded on Mom with a white-hot fireball that shot from its tuba and barbecued her where she stood before the fate of her offspring could catch up to her mind. The thing drug itself toward the animal still burning and screaming and penetrated her thrice with the needle on its tail before she could fall over.

The next scream came from one multiverse over, but the impossible beast sensed it regardless and whirled at the Dirt Pile, muscles contracting.

At the sight of it, the entity presently in charge of rearranging Cecilia Puckett’s atoms for the important mission said, “Oh, that’s bigger than the last time.” Diffuse flashes from the clouds concurred.

Brian said, “That is not real,” but he knew that it was.

Missy was speechless. She was more worried and scared than she’d been in her whole life. Keith didn’t see it; his glasses had fogged over and he’d removed them to rub them. As he wiped with his shirt he glanced up at the mathematically dubious monkey grid holding them hostage (though keeping them hidden) and noticed that the three little holes that were over their heads on the other side of the Dirt Pile were over their heads here. He asked Brian, “What’s not real?” and took a step sideways into the pit. A single hole tagged along. He returned. It came with.

Neither Brian nor Missy responded. Through the gaps in their prison Keith thought he saw something resembling a sprawling cityscape hovering in the sky high above the structure and plum, churning clouds. It illuminated briefly as if by the sharp flash of a Polaroid camera. By the time he got his glasses on it was no longer discernible, but that old trick was happening with his eyes… involuntarily, irregular bar patterns overhead blurred and fell into a focus they shouldn’t’ve, revealing a covert arrow guiding his eye back down the wall toward the big TV and Mrs. Puckett, who was now purely a column of cascading gray matter.

Keith was finally getting to watch a horror movie with his friends. Attack of the 25 Foot Flea Scorpion but no one wanted to watch. Their former wistful giddiness swapped with excruciating fear and anxiety as the hulking creature poised motionless by the treeline. The doe held still as well, though was clearly keeping an eye on it. Her fawn too low in the grass to be seen by the group, even through their broadcast quality display portal.

All watched her raise her hoof, sure nothing good was going to come from it. In the moment that it plunged, the biological anomaly keeping them imparted four verities to each their prefrontal cortices without a voice: the dingus was created to manifest a specific thought from Earth in physical form and hold it still for extraction, it has thusly only succeeded at one of these endeavors, I am a manufactured entity from a reality sideways to yours tasked with expediting this operation in this reality on a regular basis but a trickster entity similar to your Br’er Rabbit caught and sealed me in the dingus as a joke and judging from the size of that thing I may have missed a few too many checkins, and we have to get it off of the planet.

The amplified field display cut out leaving a wide-open circle between the gathering and Mutual of Omaha’s Weird Mutant Kingdom. This was no longer television. This was happening. The doe stomped and the flea-thing attacked. Missy tried to scream but was caught so by surprise that she could not. It roasted the deer and Keith wept realizing the beast was only as far from them as they were from the school. As it stabbed it, Brian turned to run with no inkling to where.

He’d been made to sit in the Bad Chair once in the first grade for jumping on furniture. There had been a warning from the teacher not to do it again and he did it again. She wasn’t mad, only directed him to the seat of correction and continued making marks on papers at her desk beside it until telling him he could get up—but a procession of first graders one by one asking what he’d done and offering their condolences made him feel more pitiful than was intended.

Brian made certain after the incident to heed warnings so’s to never get stuck in it again. He had, in fact, not had even a glimpse of it since grade two.

But as the vicious onslaught horrified Missy and Keith into a mutual embrace and the mother deer immolated and triple-pierced by the manifested monster was keeling over in the field, panicked, Brian spun and it hovered before him—the antique mission slatted solid oak banker’s armchair painted blue and red that still appeared gargantuan, even assuming that it was constructed for a grownup.

The teensy pet lights that had flown out the once-Mrs. Puckett’s eyeballs held the chair in the air ahead of him. They let go. It plopped to the ground beside the divot and creaked like an old boat flexing against the waves. Missy and Keith turned and all three saw the tall lump of matter formerly belonging to Mrs. Puckett take the rough shape of Brian and sit down in it. It looked like a Brian made out of dirty, curdled milk. The real one expelled a fearful screech as if awakened from a dream about Michael Myers by Jason Voorhees.

The armored and armed mutant in the field felt that—if it couldn’t hear or see it—and from the Bad Chair Milky Brian from a reality sideways to theirs uttered sternly, “Now we’ve little time.”

Telepathy being most immediate (and discreet), the entity initiated the fail-safe process of using eternity’s database to convert dread beyond Missy’s, Brian’s and Keith’s years into an energy that the vessel hiding above might manipulate into snatching the manifested menace by sending Brian the message, You do love your mom.

So much, Brian replied. He thought he was speaking out loud but wasn’t. He tried to avoid responding and couldn’t.

Who else?

Grandma.

Not Dad.

Dad… hits me.

He hits you for speaking your mind so hard it scares you into sobbing until you can’t catch your breath, then he hollers at you for being unable to breathe.

In the field the assassin bug quested silent and still feeling for air temperature changes and vibrations on the ground.

Milky Brian from the Bad Chair continued, You will learn to be afraid to speak, then afraid to think and grow to believe violence and a short temper are what it takes to solve problems. 

The thought made Brian discontent. To feel content he pictured a time at the Huntington Mall with Mom and Grandma. Next he was in Grandma’s living room with Mom on Christmas Eve and they were talking about his presents in Pig Latin so he couldn’t understand, but it was fun to try. Then he was with them at church on a Sunday skating out early to get the first pick of donuts from the parish hall. That was a silly thing and probably not fair but with Mom and Grandma it was like he could finally be himself. The entity thought to him, They will be the first to go.

Missy and Keith stepped closer. They couldn’t hear the interview but saw Brian staring blankly at Milky Brian with tears glassing his eyes.

Only to Brian’s mind the energy said, On a pass from the army where you plan to visit your mom you will alter those plans at the last minute to go on a date and one day later she’ll have a stroke. Your fault or not, you will blame yourself in the years after as one medical complication leads to another until they take her life.

Brian winced, suddenly hurting in places he didn’t know he could feel.

Soon after, Grandma will develop a brain disease and to atone for Mom you’ll try to help her. At first it will seem like setting up her pills and keeping an eye out will be enough but her madness and inclination to self-harm will be too much and no one—not even those closest to her—will see clear to help you help her and one night you will have to leave her at a hospital and the last words she’ll say to you the last time you see her in your life will be, “Don’t leave me.”

Brian wailed low. Missy and Keith both thought it’s what a real ghost must sound like. As he moaned, seemingly without taking a breath, they pushed on him attempting to break the paralysis but the melancholy only got louder. Milky Brian stood up from the Bad Chair and got right in Brian’s face.

You will forget all about the Christmases and the mall and donuts at church. You will remember struggling to lift your mother and grandmother off of the same spot on the same floor years apart, both crying the same bleak cry of frustration and hopelessness that you can do nothing about. You’ll forget your mom’s face before her condition, but you’ll remember that when your grandmother passes gas her farts sound exactly like yours.

Brian tiled his head back. He felt a Mom- and Grandma-sized hole growing in his soul. It was an ailment he couldn’t stand. It had to come out. The tiny, dancing lights encircled one of three small holes in the top of the monkey bar complex.

The entity concluded, Ultimately, the anguish will cause you to sever ties with everyone in your family for good and you’ll live the rest of your days apart from them wondering what might’ve happened if you’d only done the right thing and saw Mom on that break…

Brian stopped whining and a dismal beam like moldy fruit ejected from his mouth and shot straight up. Most went out of the hole and what didn’t the wee lights herded through. The monster bug couldn’t see it but detected a surge in carbon dioxide and adjusted to put the source directly ahead of itself. It wiggled its sticky back feet, fixing for an attack and was about to jump when a different ray of deep, blue light leapt out of the sky above the Dirt Pile and pinned the beast like a donkey tail.

The laser made to pull it closer, but the mutant didn’t like being tugged at, turned around and sunk its front four talons into the earth of the field.

Missy and Keith watched gobsmacked from the enclosure. They’d best not disturb Brian now! Whatever the being that took his shape using Puckett’s molecules had dragged out of him looked like it was being used by something in the sky over the storm to keep the hexapodous assassin inert, and that sucker was on to them.

Brian continued vomiting his gross laser. Milky Brian sat in the Bad Chair again and became Milky Missy, transmitting original Missy the note, It’s not enough. Keith didn’t need to hear; he took her hand in his.

You do love having friends, it thought to Missy.

I love everyone. Missy’s mind.

That’s not what it meant and the intelligence from another world was puzzled. Pulling detailed data regarding every event ever was possible but knowing how the players felt about it was not. The entity could only guess at that from seeing causes and their effects and assuming the human condition.

It had expected a more personal attachment and she’d thrown it off, but it had not the bandwidth for it; the monster should’ve been on the inside of the time barrier nearer the squall, and once it crosses the boundary the stasis will break returning everywhere to live time. Right now the thing’s trying to head in the wrong direction. They’ll need to pull it closer and be ready.

With urgency, Milky Missy perching in the old, wide chair doubled down thinking at her, Your family is moving away in two months.

No reaction.

It put more effort into it. They haven’t told you yet. By Thanksgiving you’ll be three states gone. They’ll tell you you’ll be back for plenty of visits but the drive is too far and it only happens once. Effectively, you’ve just a few weeks left with the best friends you’ll ever have.

Missy twitched and cocked her head to the side as if in thought but returned no thoughts. Keith tightened his grip. The energy wondered why this wasn’t working. It would have to make it worse. In the field the dangerous manifestation began creeping forward, away from the Dirt Pile and toward the trees from whence it spawned. Struggling to break free from the magnetic force holding it it clawed at the grass, attempted lunges and fired a few hot stars from its mouth horn (just in case) that blackened the grass and left it smoking but quickly fizzled out.

Milky Missy needed Missy vexed and sent her memories from the future. She will be on a different playground getting teased for her southern accent, one day shoved into her own locker for not wearing makeup like the other girls and in the back of a classroom trying to learn as older, slower students whisper nerd and barf bag and pizza face at her even though she has no acne. The teacher will pretend not to notice. Later, in the cafeteria of the same school alien to her at present, presumed friends will promise an invitation to a party if she helps with their essays. She’ll do the work and the address that they give her will be an abandoned glass factory where there is no party.

Missy replied out loud, “I can do things they can’t!”

She pulled her hand from Keith’s. The jagged beam powered by Brian’s grief binding the bug in the grass sizzled and thinned. If they lose it, if they do not get it off of the planet, it will be turned loose on Earth in its current form. Frustrated, the intelligent energy that looked like Missy made of cream with access to all of history stood up and belted at her mind, YOU’RE KILLING YOUR CAT!

After a pause, Missy thought back, Nah, even as she knew better.

Wee lights concentrated at her designated circle.

Keith felt her body tighten though they were no longer in physical contact and could hear her weeping. What could he do? What was happening to his friends? What would happen if it stopped?

Milky Missy to Missy, You are. You’re feeding him too much and denying him his exercise. You know that the treats are junk food and you know when he wants to play but you ignore it. He has diabetes, and you’ve been watching him drink more and pee more than usual and soon the seizures will start, but he will be diagnosed too late, and need to be put down, and as you caress him in the blanket while the veterinarian pumps the sedative you will know that it had all been your…

Missy threw back her head and passed her own sickly light from her gut through her mouth up, out the hole to the sky, crying the way a spirit might in denial of its own death. Keith backed away. Another scraggily laser—this one bluish-white—bolted from above the purple clouds and hooked the creature. Missy and Brian in tandem powering both tractor beams began hauling it backwards, toward the Dirt Pile, and the jungle gym cage formed around it that was also a net.

Milky Missy turned to face Keith and turned into Milky Keith, startled him into the Bad Chair and thought, I’ll have no problem with you. All of the puny, sparkling lights spread among the bars and rails of the sprawling and twisted metal edifice and hoisted it exposing everyone.

Keith could not decide to be more petrified or bewildered. What is going on here? They were eating pizza boogers in the cafeteria. They’d been digging for monsters in the Dirt Pile. Jimmy got busted with his video game then two actual monsters showed up and the first one made Brian and Missy shout lights at the storm so the sky city could catch the second one, he guessed to keep it from roasting more innocent animals by erecting an oversized game of Mouse Trap with him and his friends taking over the role of cheese in the danger zone.

It was all both utterly senseless and somehow of utmost importance. Keith wished he was an adult so he’d know what to do. What he had instead was a front-row seat in the Bad Chair to the ass end of an armor-plated aberration the size of a fat giraffe (if its front end were its back end and rocking a stinger) with a flamethrower on its face that was probably going to kill them all, and a doppelgänger made of tainted yogurt playing ringmaster to the whole shebang.

Making a run for it wasn’t a terrible idea. The energy or entity or intelligence running Mrs. Puckett’s discorporated essence had, in fact, never touched any of them. Nor had the lights. The beast is fast but maybe distracted enough by its own frenzied attempts to escape that Keith could? He leaned forward to push off from the wide armrests.

The Bad Chair gave a mousy squeak. The knife-like hairs on the back of the giant mutant rippled. It stopped struggling. The double-beam powered by Missy and Brian secured it still just over the edge of the time stop.

Milky Keith closed the distance between it and Keith, You…

In all of this planet’s history, no one will misread signs, misinterpret lessons, miscalculate risks, mismanage situations and misjudge people as much as you. You’ll seek hidden messages where facts are spelled out, be naive to everyone pulling the wool over you, be bold when it’s time to be humble, be fearful when you need to stand out, give little effort to the best opportunities and too much to dangerous honey pots and slippery slopes, zig when you should zag, hide when you should fight and fight when you should run at every spin of the wheel. Your luck will be so bad that it doesn’t look like bad luck, rather a never-ending gauntlet of misguided decisions stressing your dreams and straining all possible futures. The Fates awarded you above everyone celebrity status on account of karma doesn’t recognize you because it couldn’t do you any worse.

Keith hadn’t the experiential understanding to process the accusations but found them upsetting just the same, and they were true; he attracted oddball synchronicities like a Wooly Willy wand dragged iron filings. Even now the ugly thought form killing machine wanting to pull free from the beams in the field found itself having spontaneous and unusual (if not counterintuitive) thoughts of its own (not that Keith was aware).

The entity elaborated. Keith was in the first grade about to get on a bus at the end of the school day and he had to poop. He saw himself asking the teachers but no one would let him or he’d miss the bus. He was on the ride home, looking out the window, tears in his eyes from trying to hold it in and the bus went over a bump and out it came. He’d pooped his pants for the first time since he was a baby… in public. He still had to get off of the bus and walk home.

He saw himself crying halfway down the street. Moving was making the mess in his pants messier and unbearable. Other kids were stopping to ask him what was wrong and he was too embarrassed to answer. He saw his turds floating in the bathwater after his grandparents found him standing there, carried him home and cleaned him up. He had not wanted to think about this event ever again.

Your whole life will be thus. Milky Keith, telepathically.

Keith’s shame turned to frustration and the frustration became anger.

Neither Milky nor actual Keith noticed the big bug shimmying a full 180° against the binding forces so it could convert them into a slingshot, partially burrowing its bellend for an anchor.

You’ll be so oblivious to it, you’ll believe that the way you’re treated by providence must be the way to treat others, guaranteeing that no matter how hard you work, how much skill you employ and how deeply you care, only a single result is ever to come from your endeavors…

Keith heard a racket like someone slamming kitchen cabinets. He couldn’t think with that noise. He couldn’t be with it and pitched his head up to chase it out as the mutant in the field tightened to spring.

…and that is sabotage.

Everything remaining to happen that might’ve went correctly didn’t.

Keith’s ontological guts flew from his face in the form of a sharp, murky ray straight through the even more elevated focal point overhead and hit the city or whatever above the windstorm above the net formed from monkey bars, which clarified and boomed. A third tractor beam—pale green and rivaling the first two combined in girth—plunged from it and struck the creature.

The entity presently known as Milky Keith thought at the thought, You. You are the most damaging of everything a human mind can create. You’re a lie for personal gain and a robber in the name of generosity. You are the bully offering protection or else and the lame savior who insists no one and nothing could be as safe as you. You make mindlessness trendy. You make snake oil sell. You play games with power to obliterate sovereignty and autonomy. You make love and death mean nothing. You… GOD’S BONES!

When’d it turn around?! This was damned Keith. That game of his contributed to the dingus getting offset in the first place. If it jumped now like before, it could overshoot the pickup zone entirely and wind up anywhere!

The intelligent energy manipulating Cecilia Puckett’s chemistry and biology physically pushed Missy, Brian and Keith into the Dirt Pile, trances broken and discharges unplugged, although too late. The deadly thing had already sprung utilizing the full force of the trauma beams plus its own considerable stored elastic energy and cracked the boundary of the time bubble reestablishing all continuums. It zoomed like a missile, passing through Milky Keith an inch over the trench a moment after the three went in it. The lights dropped the cage that was also a net and it hit the ground but the giant, plated flea creature had already rabbited off the blacktop and embedded itself in the wall of the elementary school at the security doors.

They got themselves out of the crevice and brushed the dust off their clothes. Missy remembered her trial. Brian and Keith did not. Keith asked, “Did we get it off of the planet?”

Missy said, “I don’t think so,” mind fairly elsewhere.

The minute lights assimilated into Milky Keith, making him look like a Milky Way Keith laden with stars. Milky Way Keith worried out loud, “It’s after the dingus.”

“…a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay,” Uncle Remus sang and a cartoon sky near as perfect a blue as the one during recess erupted from behind him in his dingy cabin, illuminating the young audience just as Mr. Preston in his office exclaimed, “Dang it, Russell!” for making him drop the unclaimed thingie now jiggling to a halt on his desk.

The symbols on it had stopped flashing and in fact couldn’t be seen at all. Jimmy said, “Think you broke it,” and was interrupted by a fierce crash reverberating down the halls outside that made their four walls shake. The principal put the device back in his pocket and told the boys to wait there while he checked it out, which they did for five seconds.

They found him leaning against the lockers opposite the wired-glass doors to the gymnasitorium with his mouth agape, and heard singing and shrieking. Jimmy and Russell approached the doors and peered in. Something humongous from the playground had penetrated the back wall. Before he noticed its eyestalks, Russell thought it might be a Big Bud tractor. A protrusion on its face reminded Jimmy of the gramophone on the old RCA Victor labels.

The battle tank or whatever it was shook itself trying unstick its armor from the rubble of the busted wall. Its bell-shaped cavity began to glow cherry red like the coil burner on an electric stove. Russell, having been whipped in the eye by a horsetail enough times to learn to trust his instincts, pushed through the doors, ran in keenly sidestepping a blotch of meat sauce left on the floor and yelled, “Shields!”

Understandably, no one acknowledged him. Some of the moviegoers had stood up, most were in a panic and all had their eyes on the gigantic anomaly parked partially inside and shining like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Warhead. Russell grabbed an empty metal chair and got between the thing with its hot snoot and the lower elementary and folded it flat and smacked the ground, then held it straight up and ducked behind it. This was for their benefit; he wasn’t protecting himself.

And they understood. For what good it would do, almost all of them folded their chairs and hid behind them and the ones who didn’t were yanked down by their peers. Russell was grateful. He felt like he had his back to a torpedo heater. He watched his shadow grow more pronounced and thought, Ah, six more weeks of summer…

There was a crunch of an impact behind him and two yellow balls of fire big as beanbag chairs shot over their heads and fried the movie projector on their way to the wall over the lunch serving counter. The force of the attack blew Russell and half of the little ones over and singed them but they escaped getting fully cooked. The serving wall charred, buckled and cracked but stood against the fire and the flames petered out.

The faculty chaperones who should’ve been ushering everyone from the room watched with childlike awe through the new hole in the wall a golden UFO the size of a battleship floating over the field against dark clouds and a crimson lightning storm swing a scaffolding that looked like a twisted replica of the Screamin’ Demon at Kings Island about by a tether of coagulated spilt milk with and a monster of a scorpion caught by its curved tail on one corner of the track shooting fireballs out of its face, incinerating the blacktop, the swing set, the Dirt Pile, the basketball hoop, the see-saw…

They saw carried through the sky in the Bad Chair by a swarm of multicolored Christmas lights, Missy, Brian and Keith avoid the scorching ordnance and weave their way toward the school like a panicky housefly lost for an exit. They finally passed through the melee to the hole in the cafeteria, flew inside and landed on the stage.

The monster hexapod shook loose from the haphazard coaster rails. It hit the ground and charged, this time busting completely through the wall, and halted halfway to the hallway entrance where Principal Preston was yet paused in shock on the other side for having not the wherewithal to cogitate such events much less manage them.

Jimmy pushed on him. “Hey. Hey, man. I think you should move,” but he did not move. Jimmy took a couple steps back. He saw Mrs. Harding emerging from the nurse’s office on a set of crutches down the way, and other teachers with their students were flowing into the hallway having finally reached the conclusion that the racket they were hearing was not a Disney movie.

The grotesquerie faced the door. There was a short, straight line between it and the mystical dingus in Wallace Preston’s coat pocket. Missy, Brian and Keith on the stage on one side of it and moviegoers with Russell and the chaperones on the other could not see over it to each other.

It crouched, locked its crabtree hind legs, flexing and storing up energy, the bead of oily meat sauce that Russell had avoided smooshed under one of them. It kicked off. That foot slipped, shifted the center of gravity and made it skid on its pointy, horn-nosed face into the glass of the doors to the hallway and classrooms which shattered but did not break away due to the embedded diamond-shaped wire reinforcement.

The beast was stuck again, this time by its head what’s angry snout held mere inches from Wallace’s midsection. The leviathan struggled to get to its feet and found too much resistance pushing forward. It pulled away instead. When it did, the sharp plates of glass yet secured to the violated doorframe slipped up and under its layers of exoskeleton and it yanked its own head off.

The bug and the storm expired. A pleasant Kentucky afternoon returned outside. A gold-plated spacecraft looking built from the same blocks that make pyramids was parked on the playground, blacktop and half the field. It thrummed and issued arcs of electricity.

Missy, Brian and Keith left the chair on the stage and walked to the hulking carcass. Out-to-lunch Preston snapped out of it and pulled the knot from his pocket. Jimmy wasn’t interested any longer and climbed over the dead thing to get to where his friends were. Russell was seeing to the rattled children with the faculty and from across the auditorium yelled, “Everyone’s okay but there’s burns and maybe breaks. Some of these guys need the nurse.”

June Harding took charge, “We’ll have to move it. Whatever is it?”

The weird firefly lights that came with Missy, Brian and Keith surrounded the oak knot in Mr. Preston’s hand, took it and rapped Keith on the head with it. A bevy of lights in the thousands ejected from the blocks of the unidentified parked object and blinded everyone in the room. They retrieved the body and decapitated head of the thought and carted them to the spacecraft where the body parts dissolved into black ash that floated off and disappeared like sparks from a bonfire thrown to the night air.

The mass of lights not holding the dingus went back into the craft without using doors and Missy, Brian and Keith could see everyone else in the room looping an activity. Time was on hold for them.

The wee lights holding the dingus assumed the shape of a young fawn, not unlike the one struck down in the field, but Missy, Brian and Keith knew that it was not her. The artifact hovered inside of it. It spoke, “This way,” and led the three to the awaiting gold-plated transport.

The fawn turned to Brian and said, “You can feel like less than a pet at home but someday a family that treats you like family will find you.” Brian didn’t know why he was hearing it but he will remember it.

To Missy it thought, You can do nothing to save Moon and nothing to stop the move.

Missy said, “Do better next time.” It was good advice for the both of them.

The deer looked at Keith, shook its head and said, “I didn’t say kill it.” To all of them,“They’ll only remember that there was a disaster. Tell them it was a tornado,” and the starry deer shrunk, entered the oaken knot dingus and assimilated with the ominous alien structure, which didn’t fly away but rather winked straight out of their dimension revealing a disheveled Mrs. Puckett standing at the edge of where the Dirt Pile used to be. She was cleaning her glasses.

Remediation and recovery resumed in the cafeteria. Missy, Brian and Keith ran to Mrs. Puckett. She asked what happened and Brian told her there was a volcano. They asked her what happened and she said she remembered herself holding a tasty-looking snack cake coated in shiny, dancing sprinkles, took a bite from it, and couldn’t remember anything after that until this moment.

Jimmy and Russell saddled beside them and said because of the emergency, school was letting out early and the busses were loading. Missy thought she saw human figures in drab robes lining the trees at the back of the field and decided it best not to mention it.

She needed to go home and give Moon scratchies.

Jimmy said, “Now what?”

Keith said, “Let’s go to the Dirt Pile.”

Brian said, “We blew up the Dirt Pile.”

Keith said, “The other Dirt Pile.” For that they will need their bikes.