THE LAVA MONSTER

By Ted Colin
Recently I met a lady at a bar named Emma DeLusional. Emma was an attractive blond lady and was about 30 years old. She claimed to have seen a Lava Monster down near the border between Michigan and Ohio. I asked her how there could be a lava monster in Michigan when we don’t have any active volcanoes.

“But, we do have an active volcano in Michigan,” she argued. I used to work at the power plant where the volcano was active.”

“Well, tell me about it,” I begged.

“Why should you care?” she asked.

I gave her my business card and said, “You see I work for the Humor News Nuts bloging organization. We like to cover stories that no legitimate news organization will touch and I am sure from what you’ve told me, no one else would even listen to your story.”

Emma sighed, took a deep breath and then began telling her tale. “I was chief of security at the Big Lava Power and Light company plant down near Detroit. I was in charge of keeping people out of the plant: you know people like terrorist, news reporters, government inspectors and, other nasty people that might try to stop power generation at the Big Lava Power and Light plant. Of course one main reason we didn’t want anyone nosing around our facility was that enclosed deep within the main building we had a captive lava monster. The lava monster crash landed his spacecraft near Detroit in about 1910.

In 1910 the auto manufacturers were just starting up but, they needed a steady source of power to keep their factories running at peak capacity. Well, the only source of energy back in those days was animal dung and there were just not enough animals in the mid-west to produce the required energy. But, just as all the automobile factories were getting ready to retool and start producing horses and buggies again, the lava monster landed right in the lap of the mid-west industrialist. The automotive industry was saved and once the lava monster started giving off energy at full capacity the automobile industry expanded exponentially. In fact, there was so much energy being put out by the lava monster that plants were built to produce not just automobiles but sewing machines as well.”

At this point I just had to interrupt Emma because some of the things she was saying needed some clarification otherwise I knew my readers would not take me seriously. “First of all Emma I understand the need for a good steady source of energy for the industrialization of not just the Detroit area but, the entire Mid-West. Everyone knows from their high school history class that dung was the primary heat source and even building material for most of the previous ten million years of human history. The very first ancient alien astronauts to visit the Earth probably used animal dung to power their spaceships. Certainly Noah himself brought all those animals on board his spacecraft in order to preserve the very creatures who would create dung to heat human homes and to rebuild human habitation long after the world had been flooded with fluoridated water. But, what I want to know is how the lava monster was captured and what happened to the lava monster? After all, his demise could be what has brought our entire economy to the brink of collapse.”

“The way the economic collapse occurred is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you about but, I’ve been sitting here at the bar all day and I’m getting tired so my mind is kind of wandering. You see I have these curtains at home that need to be sewn- up because they’re dragging on the floor. But, I won’t talk about sewing anymore. Instead I’ll just tell you about how we captured the lava monster.

The idea of how to capture the lava monster came from a meeting of the big car company executives. At that meeting way back in 1911 the executives decided to use a tried and true technique for capturing any type of fire monster. It was a technique that had been around since the dark ages and had been used by kings and saucers to capture creatures like fire breathing dragons. You see fire breathers of all sorts have a penchant for toasting marshmallows. They just can’t resist those big, white, sugary snacks that taste so good especially when melted and placed between two gram crackers along with a chocolate bar. If you ever noticed when you have a crackling camp fire and you stick a nice luscious marshmallow over the fire to roast that the fire just leaps right up at the marshmallow? Heck a lot of the time the fire leaps up and catches the marshmallow on fire.”

“I have noticed that,” I replied.

“Well, the automotive executives got an entire convoy of horse drawn wagons full of marshmallows to lead the lava monster away from its crash site and to the building where it was imprisoned. And, it wasn’t easy to imprison a million ton monster made up of molten rock. But, what the executives did was to build a titanium prison up, over and, underneath the molten lava monster. You see the lava monster was made up of molten iron with a fusion reactor at its core which also doubles as a brain. Once inside the titanium walls, floors and, ceiling the lava monster was ours. Of course just to be on the safe side truckloads of marshmallows were delivered everyday to the incarcerated lava monster and the sugary product seemed to calm him down as he burnt each marshmallow to a crisp.

Now everything went well for nearly a century but about two years ago I got this call from an old boyfriend named Bill. I really liked this guy but I was never really able to impress him to the point where he would tie the knot. Bill owns a chocolate candy bar and gram cracker factory in Dearborn so, if I landed him as a husband I’d be sitting pretty when it comes to finances. Well old Bill called me up to find out where he could get his hands on about 50 tons of marshmallows ASAP. It seemed that Bill wanted to branch out his company with a brand new product known as lemon flavored smores. Bill had bought up an entire shipload of spoiled lemons and he already had the chocolate bars and the gram crackers but, alas he had no marshmallows and the country where marshmallows are grown had just gone into some sort of civil war so marshmallows were nearly impossible to come by in the open market. Bill said he knew that at the plant where I was in charge of security the very last shipment of marshmallows had been sent. He begged me to send him the shipment. Well, I did a real no, no and said I would send him the marshmallows

Now I sent Bill every single last marshmallow hoping that the lava monster would just behave and he did behave for the first couple of hours but then the lava monster started to become agitated. Suddenly, lava was slopping and slapping against the titaninium walls. The lava monster went all around the structure slapping the walls like he was looking for something. And, he was looking for something and that was a weakness in the wall. Of course after several hours of testing the wall for vulnerability he found it. It seems someone had incorrectly made a small portion of the wall so that the titaninium was actually just plain iron. It was just a small little scratch in the wall not more that about six inches long but, that was enough for the lava monster to squeeze it’s entire massive molten self through.

Soon the creature was heading east toward Lake Erie. I and my subordinates from the plant followed him as closely as we could just try to see where he was going. When the lava monster reached Lake Erie it stoped for just a moment. I don’t believe that on the planet the lava monster came from there is any water because he seemed to be a bit confused. It was like he didn’t know what he was looking at but, he knew he had to cross lake eerie and get to Canada which was on the other side of the lake. It seems that over the years the monster had probably heard of people swimming across Lake Erie to Canada to avoid being drafted. At any rate, the monster bolted head long into the lake and the lake began to boil. There was sizzling spitting water and steam rising up all over the place. I’m not sure if the lava monster felt any pain in those last few moments but, it was not long before the boiling water and steam subsided and nothing could be seen but the cool, cold waters of Lake Erie. The lava creature had no fire left in him and was now just an iron stature on the bottom of Lake Erie.”

I waited for a while to make sure that Emma was done with her story and then I said “So that’s how it all ended. That’s how America lost its automobile making capabilities.”

“That’s how we lost it but, we’re getting it back. You see there are other lava monsters that have landed here on Earth. Germany has one, Japan has another and India has two. It is rumored that China has at least ten lava monsters in captivity which is helping to power their economic boom. Luckily for us, China has lent us a couple of lava monsters to keep for a while. We hope to breed them so we can have our own little lava monster to bring back our economic vitality. The civil war has ended in the country that grows all the marshmallows so we now have plenty of food to keep our next lava monster happy.”

THE RAT WITH THE GIANT BRAIN

SHIVA THE RAT: DESTROYER OF MY WORLD
By Gerrard

I got a call today telling me that I had to come down here and write a 1,000 word story for Humor News Nuts publications. I guess I was the only one home because everyone else is out on the lakes having fun. So here I am. I have never been allowed to write anything before. I hope I don’t get in trouble.

I’m not sure if my story qualifies as a space alien type adventure. It was really weird and that says a lot coming from a guy who raises rats for a living. I guess I have to start telling the story now. I hope I just added enough fill words to put my blog over 1,000 words when I’m done.

To begin with, I live in my mom’s basement and raise rats for a living. . It is a big basement and I have several thousand rats in it. I raise the rats to sell to business and colleges. If you wear makeup, there is a good chance one of my rats had it on before you did. And, if you ever had open heart surgery chances are the surgeon that performed it learned how to do so on one of my rats. I raised all my rats from babies and I am happy about what my children have achieved. I hope that one day one of my rats will go into outer space. I’ll be a proud papa then, that’s for sure. It’s too bad girls don’t see my profession to be as exciting as I do.

I’m afraid I have digressed from the story. What happened to me involved rats? The one rat was a really smart little buddy of mine named Ernie. He was my best friend when I was in high school. You see my family has always been in the rat business and I just took it over when my dad died. Ernie could count up to six and even write the first two letters of his name “ER”.

I was never going to sell Ernie. For one think he was a fluke. You see I have both white rats and black rats. It seems different institutions want different colored rats. I guess the humans are prejudiced about color but, rats are not. One day one of my really smart black rats picked the lock on his cage and sneaked into the cage of a little white beauty. The result was the grey rat named Ernie. Ernie got his daddy’s brains and was my favorite rat from the time he was born looking so different from all the rest.

A few weeks after he was born, Ernie was already an adult rat and was looking for love in all the wrong places. I caught him sneaking out the basement on several occasions. He was going out to hang out with those wild rats that hunt the dumpsters at night and chew into grocery stores to nibble on packages of cheese. I felt certain my friend would come to a really bad end. Most of the stores out there have traps set for rats. Of course there are also rat thugs who will eat off an ear if you look cross eyed at them. I tried to talk some sense into Ernie but, our long talks did not help at all.

One day I came down stairs and there was a large brown rat busily working on my computer. I was shocked. Ernie had brought a street rat into our home. I also wondered how a rat would know how to type on a keyboard let alone be so proficient. I did know the rat did not know what it was doing since the monitor was nothing but a bunch of numbers and math symbols with letters cubed and squared all over the place. Ernie was just sitting there beside the big brown rat looking at the monitor as the brown rat was typing away. Then, the big brown rat stopped typing, turned its’ head around and said, “I am Shiva, the destroyer of your world. I am Ernie is my boyfriend. You got a problem with that rat boy?” The big rat barred its teeth at me.”

“I don’t have any problem,” I said. I then walked to my bed that was in the far corner of the basement and lay down and pretended to go to sleep. All the while I kept one eye open watching Ernie’s new girlfriend type away on my computer. I was hoping she was not ordering stuff on line. Mom will be really mad if she has to pay for a bunch of stuff.

A few days later a short, bald, middle aged man in a suit came knocking at the front door. I opened it. The man held out a badge and said that he was detective Mike Ivan Black of the Traverse City police department and he was interested in talking to a man named Ernie who went by the nickname ER. “I’ll let you talk to him but, you won’t like it,” I said. “

I took the detective downstairs and introduced him to Ernie. Ernie just sat there and made little squeaky noises. The policeman was really mad. “Do you realize that you can go to jail for obstruction of justice rat boy?” the detective yelled.

“Sorry,” I apologized.

The detective then told me that there had been a series of graffiti pictures drawn all over the down town area and each was signed by Ernie or ER. The policeman said he knew to come to my address because the culprits also left their address under each signature. Before the policeman left he promised that he would be back with a warrant. Two days past and he never came back.

I went down to the basement one day and Shiva was busily working on my computer. ER was looking befuddled at the stuff Shiva was typing after all; he could only count to six. I figured he must have really been in love with that girl since usually he lost interest in numbers once he counted up to six. Big numbers made him wander off to sniff rat droppings or scratch him. But now, poor Ernie did not want to leave the side of Shiva the super rat.

“Oh by the way,” Shiva said to me “I took care of that detective. He won’t be coming around here anymore. And, how did you like that liver dinner Left out for you last night?”

I shuddered “I thought mom made that dinner for me and left it out,” I was in tears

“No I cooked the liver just for you Gerard. I also fixed that homemade bratwurst on a bun you had for lunch today. It’s made from an old family recipe.”

I was extremely ill then, down the steps came detective Black carrying a large suitcase. I was relieved and very frightened at the same time. I was relieved that he was alive but, I was frightened as to what the detective might be going to do to me for harboring an evil rat like Shiva.

The detective walked over to the computer station and opened his case. “You need to keep your mouth shut rat boy,” the detective said to me. Shiva and I are special undercover agents for the Rat Bureau of Investigations. We are trying to infiltrate an army of super intelligent rats who are plotting to take over the world and replace mankind as the dominant species your friend Ernie is our newest recruit.” That was all the agent said.

Meanwhile, Shiva hit a button on my computer and permanently fried my entire system. Shiva then jumped into the case and said “come on sugar pants” to Ernie. My friend jumped into the case and the policeman shut up the case and walked up the stairs and out the door. I never saw Ernie again.

I did receive an X-mass card a few years ago that I think came from Ernie. All that was written inside were the initials ER and the numbers 1, 2, 3,4,5,6.