Toad, Part 3 -- A Short Story by Betsy Ashton

The third and final episode in the story of Toad and the spacemen.

Today, Toad decided he knew better than his father. Some rare and wondrous adventure lay over the low rise, across the dry wash and up onto the higher plateau. He approached the rim; the new thing, the spaceship, was on the other side.

“Whaddya think, Shorty? Should we cross?”

Shorty lowered her head, shook her ears and snorted. Rex barked and bounded down the trail, tail wagging, nose scenting the air. He stopped at the bottom, looked up at Toad and Shorty and barked again.

“Okay.”

Toad checked north, saw no clouds, and led Shorty down one side of the wash, across the deep sandy bottom, and up the rocky far side. His heart thumped by the time he climbed out. Rex led the way, until he took off after a jack rabbit and disappeared behind a clump of Joshua trees.

“We won’t tell anyone where we went. Okay?”

Shorty blew warm breath on his face. By the time he reached the rim of the wash, he was thirsty and stopped to rest. He threw himself on the ground.

“We must have come at least a hundred miles,” he said to his animals.

He took a swig of warm water from the canteen, thought about the peanut butter sandwich squished in his pocket, and decided to save it. Shorty rested her head on Toad’s shoulder and nuzzled his shirt pocket for another treat.

“Is food all you think about? It’s no wonder you’re so round.”

Toad pulled her gray ears, patted her fuzzy forehead and surrendered a treat. Rex loped back, panting, to flop in Shorty’s shade. Once again, the jack rabbit was safe. Toad watched a tarantula make its awkward way across a small patch of scree. Unusual for it to be out in the daylight, he assumed something strange had disrupted its normal hunting patterns. The spider didn’t rear up in a threatening manner, but Toad knew better than to provoke it. He’d been bitten the first week at the compound. The bite hurt less than a bee sting, but it had left a red lump for a couple of days. He reached out and touched a hairy leg.

“If you walked on me, I bet you’d tickle.” He wasn’t afraid of spiders like Jimmy was. He was too old for such nonsense.

He shifted sand between his fingers and put a bit of green bottle glass and a couple of rose quartz rocks into his pocket. Not the one with the peanut butter sandwich, the one on the other side.

“I wish I could fly.”

Lying on the warm sand, Toad watched contrails loop, spread and fade in the jet stream.

“Way above that cloud into the sky.”

He pointed to a puffy cotton ball, which appeared out of nowhere. Rex and Shorty ignored him. Rex put his head on his paws and snoozed; Shorty rested her weight on three hooves, eyes half-closed, ears flicking to keep flies from landing.

More contrails crisscrossed the bright blue sky. He dreamed of riding one to a distant land where wonders not yet imagined awaited. Could a contrail take him to the moon or even beyond? Could they be supply ships traveling between a large spaceship and the city spacemen were building? He dozed in the heat of the midday sun and dreamed of flying away.

Toad woke when Shorty nudged his nose and Rex licked his sweaty face. If he was going to finish his big adventure before his parents came home from work, he had to get moving. He ate the melted sandwich, not even noticing that the bread was soggy and the peanut butter slick. He remembered to save a bit of the crust for the chipmunks.

He brushed sand from the seat of his pants and picked up Shorty’s lead. Even though she wouldn’t stray, he felt responsible for her. Once more, Rex bounded away, nose to the ground, tail parallel and wagging. For another half hour, Toad neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary. The wind moaned softly, but otherwise the land was so silent and empty he might have been the only little boy on earth. Nothing stirred on the ground since he left the tarantula.

“I wonder where all the animals are. Could they be hiding from something?”

He’d never come this far before. He tried not to be afraid, but deep inside his chest, his heart thumped.

Toad stooped and picked up a piece of lava. “Cool. Another one for my collection.” Then he found a black snake skin, coiled it up and wrapped it in the waxed paper that once covered his sandwich. He put the skin into his pocket too. This side of the wash was loaded with treasures.

Finally, Toad heard a low rumble, the same noise almost every day for two weeks, a noise made by no one and nothing. He squinted against the glare.

“It’s just gotta be spacemen.”

Shorty’s head shot up, and she yanked back on the lead, which shipped through his fingers. Rex whined and clamped his tail between his legs.

The rumble got louder. The spaceship was headed right toward him.

Whoosh! The noise knocked Toad on his butt, his chest too tight to breathe. Shorty brayed and took off for home, followed by a yipping Rex. Toad couldn’t move. More whooshes. Then, a silver-gray jet roared thirty feet above Toad’s head. Upside down.

Toad sat and stared. Other jets followed. Some soared upward and disappeared, leaving only contrails behind. Four flew wingtip to wingtip. Then all disappeared, leaving behind little more than the normal mid afternoon wind, which lifted columns of sand skyward, dust devils replacing clouds of sand from the low-flying jets.

Toad still couldn’t move. He sat and grinned and grinned and grinned.

Later, when it was obvious neither the jets nor his four-legged friends would return, Toad picked his way to the edge of the wash, down the rocky trail and up the other side. An hour of steady marching brought him to the gate where Rex and Shorty waited as if nothing unusual had happened. Shorty flicked her tail and shook her head; Rex lay in the dust and panted.

“Hey, you’re the ‘fraidy cats. You ran off and left me behind. Remember?” He petted each of his best friends.

He let them in, fed and watered both and ran a brush across Shorty’s rough coat. He returned to the platform and threw himself on a ratty sofa, which should have long ago made its way to the town dump. Too restless to take a nap and forbidden to watch television during the day, he searched for a spare tablet and began to write his first short story: “The Day My World Changed Forever.”

Maybe, just maybe, Toad thought, he hadn’t heard a spaceship after all. Maybe, just maybe, they were jet planes. If he couldn’t fly like the pilots he’d seen, he could write a story about them. Maybe, just maybe, his mother was right.

This time, anyway.

###

Betsy Ashton is the author of Mad Max, Unintended Consequences, and Uncharted Territory, A Mad Max Mystery, now available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I'm really excited that the trade paper edition of Uncharted Territory was released this week. Please follow me on my website, on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads.

Toad, Part 2 -- A Short Story by Betsy Ashton

The story of Toad continues. The first part appeared here on October 27.

Some nights Toad slept alone in his trailer. He like to read late into the night, but he couldn’t if he was out on the platform. When his father was ready for bed, he forbid any lights on outside. After Jimmy dropped off to sleep, his parents would talk. They acted as if they didn’t know Toad could hear every word.

“When we got married, I never figured we’d be living in three trailers connected by a covered outdoor platform on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.” His mother never let his father forget he’d lost the families money when his business failed.

“Right now, we don’t have a choice. This place is free, and we need to save money to get back on our feet.” His father sounded resigned to their situation.

His grandfather owned the twenty-acre plot off Route 66 but no longer lived there. When his grandfather’s health declined, he moved into town to be closer to the hospital.

“I just wish your father had told us what to expect.” His mother complained often about the difficulty of their lives in the compound. “He should have told us everything about this place before we moved up here.”

The power company had run lines along the highway years before, so the trailers had electricity. One even had a small window air conditioner, a necessity because that was where his mother cooked. Toad and Jimmy had to make do with a fan in their trailer. Most nights the whole family slept outside on cots on the covered platform. A television antenna on the top of the largest trailer brought in three black-and-white stations. Evening viewing centered on what his parents wanted to watch. During the summer the television was outside, but Toad suspected that when the weather changed, his father would move it into the main trailer, because that was also where his parents would sleep.

What the compound lacked was running water, hence the outhouses. His mother took large water bottles to work with her once a week to fill at a public tap.

“What could be better than not having to take a bath every night,” Jimmy said.

Sun heated water in a large outdoor tank. During the week, the boys took sponge baths every night; on Saturday a full washtub bath was the rule.

Toad had grown brown and sturdy under the relentless sun. He was no longer the pasty stick-boy he had been when his family left the city for a new beginning in the desert.

###

Rex sat patiently, tongue hanging out, tail sending up small plumes of sandy dust with each wag. Toad pulled Rex’s ear and gave him a scratch under the chin. In a pen at the far side of the compound, adjacent to a pair of outhouses, Shorty thrust her head over the rail and blew softly. When he walked up to the gate, she nuzzled his pocket for a treat. He clipped a lead to her halter, opened the gate and led her through the main opening in the perimeter fence. His parents trusted him to leave the compound to play and explore as long as he took Shorty and Rex with him. Usually, Jimmy tagged along. When he became too tired to walk, Toad would boost him onto Shorty’s broad back. He hooked and locked the gate behind him to keep wild animals and strangers out. With only two wooden houses on his dirt road and no children except his brother, these animals were Toad’s best friends.

Behind him came the whoosh of big rigs running north. Toad headed toward the end of the world far away from the rising sun and the highway. This had become his daily routine since the family moved in May after school ended. Rex took a couple of steps toward the highway and whined. Toad whistled.

“No, boy. Not that way. I don’t want you to get hit by a truck.”

###

Thirty minutes after he started walking, Toad noticed a slight shift in the sand near his foot. He froze, stooped and saw a tiny dinosaur sunning itself beside a rock. He picked up the horny toad and stroked its armored head and spiny back.

“You just stay here and warm yourself,” Toad said to the dinosaur. “I can’t play with you today. I got bigger things on my mind. I have to meet the spacemen.”

Toad put the reptile back on the ground where it burrowed itself halfway into the sand. He continued his hike toward the spaceship. Behind him, half asleep, Shorty bobbed her long-eared head. Rex flushed a rabbit but lost it down a hole and barked at a snake on a patch of sand. Toad turned away from the snake, but kept marching toward a low rise. He saw a scurry of activity when a striped head with two shiny black eyes popped out of a hole. He squatted in the sand and held out his hand. A striped body and short bushy tail followed the head out of the hole and into Toad’s hand.

“Hey, Chip. Where’s Dale?” Toad stroked the little critter, which rewarded him with a chirp and a couple of pellets of poop in his hand. Toad had named the chipmunks Chip and Dale after his favorite comic book characters right around the time he made friends with them.

Dale ran out of a different burrow a couple of yards away. He chattered as if complaining that Toad wasn’t petting him.

“You’re such little beggars. I’ll save some of my sandwich. You can have it when I get back,” Toad promised. He played with them until they jumped out of his hand, and with twin swishes of their tails disappeared into their holes.

Ever since his family moved into the compound, Toad had spent his days exploring and daydreaming. At first he didn’t know anything about this new world. To keep him safe, his father and grandfather taught him and his brother how to identify snake trails, ant nests, clouds on the distant horizon, and plants that bit if you touched them. Toad forgot about the plants once and came home one afternoon full of sharp spines. It hurt like heck when his mother pulled jumping cactus out with tweezers.

He had no idea how much land he had to roam in. He and Jimmy started close to the fenced perimeter of the compound, gradually working their way outward.

“What do you want to play today?” Toad asked every morning.

“Cowboys and Indians.”

But sometimes when Toad grew tired of cowboys and Indians, they dug a shallow fort and played war. What one boy couldn’t dream up, the other could.

Not only was Toad more imaginative, he was also the braver one. Jimmy followed his father’s instructions to the letter, even when they got in the way of a grand adventure. Toad thought those instructions were suggestions for good behavior, not orders to be blindly obeyed.

“You are never, ever, to go into the dry wash. It could flood in minutes if there’s a storm to the north,” his father had warned. “It’s the most dangerous place around here. Other than the highway, that is.”

What could be more exciting, more dangerous than finding spacemen? Natural hazards had nothing on the possibility of a real spaceship. 

Toad had crossed the wash a few times. before. Jimmy tattled on him once. His father spanked him; he ate dinner standing up. Well, his brother couldn’t tattle today.

### Toad continues on November 27.

###

Betsy Ashton is the author of Mad Max, Unintended Consequences, and Uncharted Territory, A Mad Max Mystery, now available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I'm really excited that the trade paper edition of Uncharted Territory was released this week. Please follow me on my website, on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads.

Toad, Part 1 -- A Short Story by Betsy Ashton

Most of you know that I tend to write about serious, even dark, themes. In my Mad Max series I explore traumatic brain injuries, racism, pastoral abuse, murder, and others. Yes, I like to kill people, as I did with great abandon in my upcoming Eyes Without A Face, about a female serial killer.

So, to show a different side of me, in my next three posts I'll share a short story about a little boy named Toad.

Toad lay in his bed while the world woke up around him. He heard his dad drive his pickup through the gate to travel the twenty miles up the highway to his job selling appliances at Montgomery Ward. His mother wrestled his eight-year-old brother into her truck. Jimmy howled because he had to get up early, because he had to stay all day with his mother at the doctor’s office where she worked in town, and most of all because he had to walk next door to the dentist for his annual teeth cleaning. Toad lay still until his brother’s bellowing faded away with the sound of the truck engine. He hadn’t heard the clang of the chain link gate shut behind her, so he knew his mother had left the gate open. Again.

She harped on him to lock the gate, but at least twice a week she ran late and skipped the task, making her the worst offender in the family. Even if he didn’t know the rules, he would always lock the gate to keep his dog safe.

On his first day living in the trailer compound, even before he unpacked his boxes of clothes, books and writing tablets, his grandfather gathered the family together to talk about rattlesnakes.

“They like to sun themselves near our steps.” He pointed to several places where he’d seen rattlers. “There, there and there.”

Jimmy’s eyes grew round as a hubcap. “Gee!”

“Never get close to one, because they strike faster than you can imagine.”

“I can outrun anything.” At eight, Jimmy had infinite faith in his ability to get away from danger.

Their grandfather laughed and ruffled Jimmy’s hair. He showed the family how to use the forked sticks he’d hung on hooks beside each exit, where he kept the machetes nearby and how to pin the snake to the ground before chopping off its head.

“Now, don’t get near the mouth. The fangs are still full of poison even after the snake is dead.”

“I want a rattle.” Jimmy’s eyes glowed with love for his grandfather.

The old man reached up to a shelf near the steps and handed dried rattles to each of the boys.

“Wow!” Toad breathed.                                                                                                         

“Yippee!” Jimmy shouted.

###

I can’t believe my good luck. I have the whole day to myself.

For once, he wasn’t in charge of his younger brother. At ten, Toad’s parents said he was responsible enough to be left at the trailer compound, with or without his brother.

Jimmy’s okay, but he’s a scaredy cat and a tattletale.

Today, Toad had privacy. He wanted to explore, go out to a forbidden place. Something wondrous had entered his world, and he had, just had, to know what it was.

Today I’m going further west than ever, out where the spaceship landed.

For more than a week, new loud noises carried across the open desert from the higher plateau beyond the dry wash. White trails filled the sky. It had to be a spaceship.

“What else could it be?” Toad muttered. He wondered if the white trails were a sign that spacemen were building a landing spot or a city nearby. “I bet they’re bringing supplies from a huge ship hiding in the shadow of the moon.” Could a smaller ship have already landed? Was it burying itself under the sand? It could be a scouting ship with spacemen who wanted to see if we are friendly.

###

He had tried to tell his parents about this stupendous event.

“Hey, Dad. I think a spaceship landed out in the desert,” he said one night at dinner.

Jimmy squealed and leaped out of his chair. “Let’s go find it.”

His father’s long arm stopped him in mid leap. “Sit.” He took a long swallow from his beer can. 

“What’s this nonsense about a spaceship?”

Toad told him about the strange noises coming from the west. He hadn’t see it land, but the animals were behaving oddly. “I’m positive it’s a spaceship.”

His father laughed. “You have quite an imagination, young man.”

“Yeah,” said Jimmy. “You make stuff up all the time.” If he couldn’t search for the spaceship, he could try stealing Toad’s thunder. Toad made up his mind that Jimmy would never meet the spacemen.

“Maybe you should become a writer,” his mother said.

“But I want to learn to fly,” Toad said.

“Ha,” said his father

Let them eat their words. I’ll find the spaceship. They’ll be sorry when I become famous.

###

Toad bounded out to where his German Shepherd waited. He filled his dish with kibble and put down fresh water before he trotted across the barren ground between living area and gate. After just a few weeks, he no longer found it odd that he lived in a three-trailer compound in the middle of the desert instead of a suburb outside a mid-sized city.

He scampered across the platform between his trailer and his parents’ and pushed through the screen door into the kitchen where he found a bowl of cereal waiting for milk.

“Oh boy, Rice Krispies.”

“It’s a good day for you to find the spaceship,” said Snap, Crackle and Pop.

A quick swipe at this teeth, and he was ready for his big adventure. He stuffed a peanut butter sandwich his mom had left for his lunch in his pants pocket, fastened his canteen to his belt and left the trailer. He checked for snakes before stepping off the platform into the dirt surrounding his home.

He had already killed his first snake, much to Jimmy’s dismay. The younger boy wanted, no needed, to kill his own snake and keep the rattle in his pocket.

“That’s not fair. You should have let me kill the snake.” Jimmy whined.

“You went to town with Mom to swim. I couldn’t let the snake get away.” Used as he was to Jimmy’s always feeling like a younger brother and therefore inferior, Toad promised the next snake was his brother’s, if his brother was at home.

### To Be Continued on November 17.

###

Betsy Ashton is the author of Mad Max, Unintended Consequences, and Uncharted Territory, A Mad Max Mystery, now available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I'm really excited that the trade paper edition of Uncharted Territory was released this week. Please follow me on my website, on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads.