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.”