Wings
Prompt: Wings
Author: InsolentScrawl
X X X
“Mom, we need something for the wings!” Paul yelled from the garage.
The wings? Beth thought, typing away on her laptop, ensconced comfortably in her recliner. Why would they need wings?
It often worried her when her boys worked in the garage and made requests like that. One never knew what an eight-year-old and ten-year-old would do when left to their own devices. Especially around tools.
“Mom, how do you expect me to finish the spaceship without wings?” he asked, exasperation showing through at every word.
Okay. Right. The spaceship.
Perhaps it would be better to explain from the start… when it all began. When Beth and her daughter, a pre-teen Charlotte, convinced Paul (age eight) and Jake (age ten) to build a spaceship.
X X X
“Hey mom, weren’t you saying that the world is going to end in 2012?” Charlotte asked loudly from the seat middle seat next to her in the truck. After an extended weekend at the family cabin, they were on their way home, all six people crammed into the four-wheel-drive vehicle.
Smirking, she replied, “Yes, I did. The Mayan calendar ends in 2012.”
The statement got precisely the reaction she’d wanted. Two voices worriedly piped up, “The world’s gonna end?”
“Yes. In fact, there’s going to be a polar shift. The world isn’t going to end, per se. It’s more that for about a month, as the magnetic shift occurs, we won’t have gravity,” Beth replied, working hard to keep a straight face.
Bob, Beth’s husband, gave her a sidelong glance, grinning. Then he shook his head lightly in humor and asked, “Why don’t we just stop off at the restaurant up here for breakfast?”
“Sounds good,” Beth replied, turning her head and smiling at her two young boys, and her five-year-old daughter in the back seat.
After pulling into the parking lot a few minutes later, Beth figured the conversation had been forgotten. Then Jake asked, “Mom? How do we know that the world’s going to end?”
Thinking fast on her feet, she gave the boys a serious look as they settled around a table. “Well, boys… since we’re talking about a magnetic shift in the poles, then we need to look for some evidence, right?”
Both boys nodded, wide-eyed. Then she had a brilliant idea. “Well, in the southern part of the Earth, the toilets rotate the other direction than they do up here in the northern part of the Earth.”
Again, both boys nodded. Beth glanced up at Charlotte, whose face had turned pink from choking back laughter. Giving her daughter a wink, she turned her face - stone-cold serious - back to the boys. “It would seem to me that if the magnetic shift were about to occur, the toilet water wouldn’t spin as much when you flush. That it wouldn’t swirl.”
The boys shot off a couple of ‘technical’ questions (primarily wanting to know if they’d be able to float around when the magnetic shift happened), and then asked, “Can we go to the bathroom?”
With their waitress done taking orders, Beth smiled at her boys and nodded, watching them shoot out of their chairs like small rockets. She had no doubt that within five minutes, they’d be back, telling her she was full of it. Small boys could be gullible, but not that gullible.
Then they came out of the bathroom, vibrating with excitement, and yelling, “Mom! Mom!”
Then Jake stood directly in front of her and said, “I think we’ve got a problem.”
“Yeah,” Paul concurred, bobbing his little blond head up and down next to his big brother. “We’ve got a problem.”
Giving them a questioning look and wondering if they’d blown something up in the bathroom, Beth tentatively asked, “Why?”
“Mom,” Jake said, his voice really low, “the toilets flush straight down!”
In the two hour drive home, the boys conspired on the design of the spaceship needed to hold more than fifty people for six months in space until the magnetic shift completed its cycle. Beth’s daughters volunteered to decorate (primarily because the boys refused to let them help in the design, and Beth wouldn’t allow them to put a ‘No Girls Allowed But Mom’ sign on the door of the ship).
So that was how Jake and Paul ended up needing a set of wings.
And then there was the issue of having to power it all. That’s a story for another time.
To be continued… next week.