Holy hellfire!
I scrambled out of the kitchen with the rest of my guests to see what new calamity Aunt Liza had conjured up.
One would think the bestselling police procedurals I write would provide enough excitement in my life. But the fictional antics I dream up are nothing compared to living the next farm over from my crazy Aunt Liza.
No one would believe my award-winning fiction, written under the nom de plume Nicky Blane, could be based on the real-life shenanigans my Aunt Liza cooks up next door.
We found her standing next to a heap of twisted metal in the center of a circle of charred ground. Quite the contrast to the blanket of snow that covered everything else in sight.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
Liza said nothing just blinked. Okay, she tried to blink, which must have been difficult and rather uncomfortable being as she had singed eyebrows and only a smattering of eyelashes left. Her plaid hunter’s cap smoked and sizzled right along with her apocalyptic mess.
Despite my yelling, she still wasn’t focusing on me or the question I’d barked at her. Apparently, she was still dazed by her latest blow-up.
It took a second for my mind to register what the metal had once been. No. She didn’t, I thought, certain she wasn’t that far over the total nutjob line.
But then I caught what was left of the manufacturer’s label on one piece of smoking metal. It was the wreckage of the two rusting gasoline tanks that had been on our land since long before I was born.
Damn. She truly had lost all of her marbles.
Thankfully, Captain Allen, a thirty-year veteran of our Sheriff’s Department and now my Editor’s significant other, hadn’t yet felt the need to take out his handcuffs or unholster his duty weapon, though his hand was resting on its stock. I had a feeling that when it came to my Aunt Liza, he would always be duty ready.
“Well?” I continued, not about to let her weasel her way out of an explanation.
“I was just usin’ the support structure of the tanks to hang up a couple of dolls. I didn’t count on there being anything left in them rusty old things.”
“Uh...Hello, Genius! Gasoline is extremely explosive! Why would you even consider firing that cannon of yours at a gas tank?! Wait a minute. Did you say dolls?!”
“So what? Yes, they were dolls. I’m trying out a new spell on a couple of folks.”
She said this as though it were a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
“Let me get this straight. As far as you’re concerned, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with hanging Voodoo dolls on a gas tank and then annihilating ‘em with a 10-gauge shotgun?”
She cocked her head as if she were thinking about it really hard.
There wasn’t a single one of us standing there who didn’t know all kinds of major trouble resulted when her wheels were crankin’ that fast and furious.
“Yeah. I don’t see anything wrong with that,” she said, taking off her cap, dropping it to the ground, and snuffing out the last remnants of burning material with her pink rubber boots.
“What y’all should be concerned about, however, is that I think my spell may have gone a wee bit awry.”