The Wonderfulist and Three Other Short Stories

By Neil Larkins

Story #1
"The Wonderfulist"
Away for twelve years, Willie is back on business to the town he grew up in -- and with no desire to reconnect with anything from his past. Still, he makes a nostalgic visit to a once-popular but now abandoned lake pier. There he encounters a strange device that for a nickel forces him to change everything about how he'd remembered that past.

Story #2
"Jack be Simple"
Jack believes he's an ordinary guy, though most people think he's just simple. But what happens one day in his workshop is anything but simple -- and far from ordinary. Jack encounters a potent, indefinable energy source yet doesn't know that this meeting is but a precursor: He and the whole world is about to witness an epic struggle when a massive creature from space chooses earth to satiate its voracious appetite.

Story #3
"Head Over Heels"
A little comedic sideshow: Wilber's first-- and only -- day at a new job.

Story #4
"The Case of the Instant Rewind"
[A nod to the hard-boiled detectives created by Dashiel Hemmet and others.]
Lieutenant Inspector Frankie Muldoon has a murder case that's got him scratching his head. His suspect, a 3-time loser, has an air-tight alibi while the richest dame in town, who is definitely involved, ain't talkin'. Technology, which Muldoon neither likes nor much understands, figures into the mix. He cracks the case when he realizes that something about that technology doesn't add up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neil Larkins
• Release date: Apr 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476272092

Neil Larkins

A "golden-ager" (whatever that is) now living in Arizona, I was born in Kansas and raised in Colorado. Back in the sixties I tried college but couldn't make a go of it. But college wasn't all bad: it was where I met my first wife, Teresa who gave me a wonderful daughter and thirty-three fascinating and adventuresome years until she succumbed to breast cancer. During those years I worked my butt off as a tradesman 'til I retired. In 2005 I met and married a wonderful lady who is everything to me. No, not much interesting about me, but I hope that you will find my stories compelling and make you want to read more. Thanks.

Book preview

THE WONDERFULIST

And

THREE OTHER SHORT STORIES

Neil Larkins

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PUBLISHED BY

Neil Larkins on Smashwords

Copyright 2012 by Neil Larkins

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Thank you for purchasing this Smashwords book. This book is copyrighted by the Publisher, Neil Larkins and the edition downloaded is not available for sharing or reproduction in any form or in any part by any means without the express written permission of the Publisher. Additional copies are available from Smashwords for purchase.

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THE WONDERFULIST

Part 1

When Willie graduated from Lakeshore High School he had dreams. He'd wanted to become a big city architect, to design and build impressive structures people would ooh and aah over. And of course pay him big money for. There was no opportunity for such a dream to be fulfilled in a little backwater town like Lakeshore and so off he went. Willy left for college and the great outside world.

When he'd left, Willie never intended to return home at all. Yet as the years passed he did come back a few times: a parent's birthday or maybe on holiday, but always as seldom as possible. His mom and dad were all that brought him back. There’d never been much relationship with anyone else in the town.

His folks never owned real estate; they’d always rented the little house Willie grew up in. With no properties to inherit or inhabit, when they died – first Dad and ten months later, Mom – he’d only returned long enough to oversee their burial and then leave.

It had now been twelve years since he'd been in Lakeshore and only here today on business. The architect dream thing had long ago faded then crashed into ruins. Nowadays Willie worked as a rep for a huge agribusiness firm which just acquired Tuttleston Feed and Seed store in Lakeshore where his dad had worked for fifty years. Willy had been sent to hammer out the details of getting the operation changed over to corporate policy while careful to maintain the old town flavor…in order to ensure the Lakeshore-area farmers would still feel like doing business there.

He’d gotten into town a day early – perhaps by accident, perhaps on purpose, but either way, he had a few hours to spare. Why not visit the old pier at the lake, one of the few places that held good memories and indulge in a bit of nostalgia?

It wasn’t quite what he had remembered.

Some fifteen years ago his dad had said a chemical plant on the north edge of the lake had polluted the water and townsfolk stopped going to the pier. The state's environmental quality department and the EPA slapped a huge fine on that plant and its owners, and rather than fix the problem they shut it down. The water cleared up – mostly by itself – but the damage in the minds of the people remained and no one returned. Fishing off the pier and fun on the beach was replaced with computers and video games and cable TV and all the rest of modern tech society that had reached into small town America. The pier in all its hominess could not compete.

Knowing this, Willie expected the pier to be a bit derelict. What he hadn’t expected however was its complete abandonment. As he drove over he’d thought that maybe the bait shop was still in operation. Some old-timers still fished didn’t they? Nothing stopped a dedicated fisherman. They needed bait, tackle, a place to hang out and drink beer when the fish weren't biting.

Perhaps not. When he got there he discovered the bait shop boarded up and neglected for so long that the roof had collapsed on one side.

It was the same for the arcade in a little building right next to the bait shop. It too was closed and in terrible condition. But since it'd never been much of an entertainment center, one a little burg like Lakeshore could hardly sustain even in the most ideal of times, Willie wasn't surprised to find it closed, pinball machines and the rest gone.

Yet for Willie the nostalgia remained. The pier was one part of Lakeshore he never wanted to abandon to the past. The rot and the decay and the lack of people and fun he found today would not take away his memories. He parked his car and strolled onto the pier. The structure was not completely ruined as he avoided a broken plank here and a gaping hole from a totally missing board there. When he reached the end he stood for a few minutes to look out over the water.

He sighed. The lovely view was still there, but it just wasn’t the same.

He turned to go back and noticed a young couple had come onto the pier. It surprised Willie at first but then guessed that there were still people who could yet enjoy nature.

The couple didn’t seem to be enjoying the view. As he walked by where they stood at the rail he could tell they were in a heated argument. They kept the bitter invectives they threw at each other through gritted teeth at a low level but he still heard what they were battling over: Finances.

The man: I told you not to spend that money, to put it aside, so why did you?

The woman: And I told you I needed it for groceries. Don’t blame me. If you got a decent job…

The man: A decent job? A truck couldn't haul in enough money to satisfy you. Look at what you waste on crap.

The woman: Crap, huh? What about all that money you spend on your toys, your boat and quad and big screen TV, and at the bar every night?

Willie had not meant to stop. But he had, and the couple noticed. They halted their argument and glared at him. He turned his head with a snap and looked out over the lake, acted as though he had not seen or heard then walked on past.

He returned to where the pier joined the shore. The old arcade building stood at that juncture, half of it on land and half on the pier. Willie remembered how once was the time you could play pinball and look down between the floorboards and see water. He and Eddie Southwell – it felt odd remembering Eddie just then – would drink Cokes and eat pretzel sticks and challenge each other to winner-take-all contests of skill. Huh. What had they played for then – quarters? Yeah, they had and if they didn't have those, cigarettes.

Willie looked at the arcade and wondered what had happened to Eddie. He hadn’t thought about his old pal for years – or anyone else from his high school graduating class. The district consolidated the year after he graduated which closed the Lakeshore school sending all Lakeshore kids to Emerson, the county seat and he’d lost interest. Forget about that, he'd thought at the time. Emerson wasn't his school and he reasoned that all his classmates had probably lost interest the same as him. Let it go.

The arcade building did matter, for now at least. He discovered it amusing to reminisce about the thing, what he’d seen and done there. He strolled around to the side opposite the pier. As he walked to that side he noticed the building muffled the voices of the couple as they restarted their feud. Thank goodness. Now his mind was free to pay more attention to his memories.

When he came around to the west side of the structure, the side that faced the open water, he was surprised to see…What was that, a row of gumball machines? Yes. He'd forgotten all about them and they were just as he had remembered: seven glass-topped, penny gumball machines. There they sat, lined up upon an extension of the pier that ran parallel to the arcade.

How odd. Everything else had been removed from around the arcade – the awning, the bench, even the signage, but not these machines.

He walked over to where they were for a closer look. They were indeed the gumball machines he remembered and all empty – with the exception of one. A purple and yellow device, the paint was now so faded and peeled Willie couldn't tell for sure. It still had gumballs inside…or what was left of them. The globe was cracked and rainwater had gotten in, the gumballs a mass of mold and slime. Ants and worms crawled all on and through the gooey mess.

Willie smiled and then grimaced. Eew! he said out loud and turned his head aside.

That’s when he saw it: another gumball machine. Only it wasn’t a gumball machine; it was... something else. Definitely something else. It sat apart, removed about eight maybe ten feet from the others at the very end of the pier extension. Like the others it was a vending device of some sort...but what did it dispense? And why hadn't he seen it before?

He could still hear the couple in their squabble as he stepped over to this – whatever it was that had caught his eye. It didn’t look anything like the others, square, cube-like with no round globe or glass window to let the buyer see its contents. He looked closer and could see it was made of metal, like the gumball dispensers and certainly dispensed something different: Horoscopes. The word at the top of the device was difficult to read – a peeling, sun-bleached decal, but unmistakable.

Now this was really different.

A similarly faded, barely discernible painted plaque decorated with stars, moons and comets explained it all. What’s In The Stars? the headline asked in Arabic script-like letters. Underneath, a sub-headline announced: Know your Future. Find Peace, Happiness, Love, Wealth! It’s all foretold in the Heavens.

Oh, brother, thought Willie as he smiled. Who would ever believe that stuff?

Yet somebody must have. The machine had been put there after all. The owner, whoever it was, once thought he or she could make a