Grandpa’s Adventure with Mean Todd

By Sarah Falanga

“Tell me about Mean Todd, Grandpa—and how he died.” Dan grinned up at me.

It was a lazy, warm evening, and the air filled with the chatter of blind flies. The sun set in a red glow behind tired clouds.

I looked across my family’s drywick field to Mean Todd’s ramshackle farm. I remembered with a shudder what had happened there, all those years ago.

My grandson’s gaze followed mine.

Dan was ten—ready to hear the story… but not all the details.

“I’m always scared to go past that old place,” he said, making a face at the charred fragments of building.

“It’s harmless now, Son,” I said. “You should have been afraid to pass his land back in the day, though he mostly did no harm to his own.”

Dan’s eyes grew wide. “You mean…”

I nodded. “That’s right. Foreigners—travelers mostly—were who he took.”

“What did he do to them?”

“No saying—none of the bodies were ever found, due to the fire.”

Dan shivered. “But you helped catch Mean Todd, right?”

“If you mean, did I finally take the pluck to go across the field and find out what all the screaming was about—yes. Yes, I did.” I shifted in my chair.

Dan edged forward.

“It was an evening like this. Warm, pleasant… all except for that screaming. The sort of sound to chill your bones.  For a long time, I was too scared to figure out what was going on. Finally, something happened to me…” I smiled, remembering.

“What happened to you?” Dan whispered.

“Courage,” I said. “It’s a strange beast, and it took grip of me. I just couldn’t stand it no longer, and I marched across our land, armed with no more than the tools I already had in my hands. I went and did what I never would have thought of doing without courage—busted down that old door on Mean Todd’s house and looked in to see what he was about.”

My grandson’s eyes were round as saucers. “What did you see?”

“I saw Mean Todd, looking twice as mean as I’d ever seen him. And shackled in the corner, his latest captive. If I wasn’t already gripped by courage, and fear—I don’t mind telling you—I would have been plain disgusted. Mean Todd was five times the monster we thought him, because up until then, we didn’t know he took foreigners. And this foreigner more so, because it was a human.”

Dan jumped back. “What did you do?”

I was well heated up, excited by the memories. His question stopped me in my tracks. There were details I couldn’t tell my grandson—I didn’t want to scare him. “Well, I knocked out ol’ Todd with my plasma hacker—like a fool farmer, that’s all I had on me—released the human, and ran.” I chuckled. “I just about had to carry the human in my antennae; the poor fella was that near dead.”

“What happened to the human?” Dan asked.

“The surgeons fixed him up nicely, and he was taken back to his realm,” I said. “He was one of the lucky ones.”

Dan shifted, making a face.

I felt obligated to put in a lesson, so I leaned forward and looked my grandson in the eyes. “You know the laws given us by the Mighty One, isn’t that so, Son?”

He quoted the exact words he’d been taught. “Unlike Kind must not interfere, merge, seize, or make themselves known to the Sacred Foreigners, especially the Blessed Mankind. For all creatures belong to the Mighty One and all kinds shall be united in the Good Time.”

“That’s so.” I nodded. “Though there have been many a time that law has been broken by weaklings like Mean Todd, most often against humans.”

“But why?” Grandson asked.

I shook my head. “There’s no accounting for what some folk will do.”

“How many foreigners do you think Mean Todd took?” the youngster asked.

“No telling.” Better not let Dan dwell on those grisly details.

“And what happened to him?”

“The authorities took care of him,” I answered. But I knew the authorities hadn’t arrived until after the house was ablaze.

“Who burned down the house, then? The other kids say there was a big explosion like stavvin in a storm, and no one knows what…” His voice trailed away when he saw the warning look in my eyes that told him he shouldn’t listen to gossip.

“I can’t answer that,” I said. “I was away taking the human to the surgeons. When I returned, the house was practically all gone, as you see it now.”

That, at least, was true.

“Have you ever been to the humans’ home world?”

I nodded. “Nice place, not unlike here. There are even folk like us there—farmers, though they don’t have the equipment we do. And their soil is brown, not red, and the sun is the brightest thing you can imagine, shining in a blue sky. And they get water from the sky, which they call rain.”

Dan made a face and then laughed. “You’re pulling my antennae!”

I laughed with him. “Believe what you will or wait ’til you see it when you go on an expedition.” I pushed to my feet. “Now, let’s go in and see if the gravmorx is ready to eat.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Falanga lives under the open skies of New Mexico, where she’s growing her business of coziness and enjoying simple pleasures. She started writing science-fiction stories when she became too old to ‘make-believe’ them, and is now the co-editor of the Whitstead anthologies. Her fiction is inspired by George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbit, Ellis Peters, Doctor Who, and Pixar movies. Besides writing, she loves to sketch, sew, bake, walk, and listen to music.

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