"CAMELOT #1"
by Grant Bailie
A giant cricket descends upon our fair city of Mortarville. It drops without warning from the clouds, landing in the center of Municipal parking lot number 7 and rising nearly instantly back up into sky to be swallowed up again, leaving behind it a wake of rubble, broken glass, bent metal and a five minute cacophony of car alarms. News cameras and emergency vehicles arrive almost simultaneously a few minutes later, and the vendors set up shop across the street a few minutes after that. One guy tries to sell shirts commemorating the event, but they are just white T-shirts with a cricket drawn crudely in the front with a green magic marker. The cricket looks more like a dog with antennas and two broken back legs. No one is buying. All eyes and cameras look to the skies, waiting for the strange and mammoth creature to reappear. Our necks begin to hurt.
The sun sets with no further phenomenon of size or nature taking place. Sirens are turned off. Cameras, cords and equipment are packed up. The cars slowly pull away one by one, or they are towed away, or they are swept up by city workers. All that is left is the yellow caution tape strung up around the area of impact. It comes undone in one corner and flaps around in the air as the sky darkens completely and few stars appear in their usual places.
It is a disappointing end to such an interesting beginning, and some of us are not ready to go home yet. We get a large table at Mom’s House of Spaghetti and Ice Cream. Half of us order the spaghetti and the other half order the ice cream, and while we are waiting for our waitress to mix up the two sets we bandy about various theories on the day’s strange occurrence. We talk about radiation, industrial pollutants, secret government labs. The usual suspects.
Inevitably someone brings up the Bible, end-times and all of that.
A swarm of locust, he points out. Classic stuff.
But it was no swarm, we argue. It was just one. And it was a cricket.
After that we argue some about the difference between a cricket and a locust, but none of us did that well in biology and we cannot arrive on any definitive answer. The food comes, and we eat. The check comes and we leave. We will go home now, watch the TV and see what the experts think, but they will not think much. A giant cricket came and went. The world goes on.
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Grant Bailie lives in Cleveland with his wife and, every other weekend, his two children. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, The Exquisite Corpse, Pindeldyboz, Night Train and numerous other publications, some of them featuring all-color pictures. His first novel "Cloud 8," was published in 2003 to glowing reviews and poor sales.
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