The Remarkable Inventions of Walter Mortinson

by Quinn Sosna-Spear

  “You never want to talk about him.”

  “Now isn’t the time.”

  “It’s never the time.”

  Her face whipped up to his. “To talk about your father’s death? No, it isn’t.”

  Walter sat rigidly, and the words he had been trying to keep locked away tumbled out, faster and icier than he’d intended.

  “How did he die?”

  “I told you.”

  “That you don’t know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hadorah stood abruptly, nearly knocking her plate over. She was frazzled. Hadorah wasn’t good at being frazzled. She grabbed the plate, her hands unsteady, and stormed from the room.

  Walter refused to look, not even when the door slapped shut behind her.

  CHAPTER 10

  •  •  •

  YET UNREIMAGINED

  Tomorrow came far too quickly for Walter’s taste.

  The entire town was packed into the tiny church around him, sardines in a can. Unlike most sardines in cans, however, everyone was wiggling.

  The women, young and old, wore their finest mourning attire: collars up to their chins and sleeves down to their knuckles. The men donned their most solemn bow ties and oiled their mustaches. The children pulled on their itchy black robes, woven from wool, coal, and something intentionally scratchy. Men, women, and children alike watched the gloomy display with varying degrees of boredom.

  Funerals in Moormouth were the biggest events all year, but, as it happens in any place where ceremony rules over sentiment, Moormouthian funerals were awfully serious, cumbersome affairs. No one truly enjoyed them, if people were to be honest, least of all the person of honor.

  Only Walter and the slight girl in the front row (fiddling with her eye patch) actually listened to every word.

  Preacher Chernbog looked rather close to death himself, if Walter were to say so. And Walter was among a line of experts on the matter, including his mother and the town doctor. Hadorah was quite good at her job, and the doctor was terrible at his, which meant they saw about the same number of dead people.

  But neither Hadorah nor the doctor, nor anyone else, for that matter, could remember a time before Chernbog, who was as gray as a human could be. His sermons were equally monotone, only shaken up by his quavering voice. In front of Chernbog was Arlo, lying quietly in his open coffin.

  Suddenly, and with a surprising amount of vigor, the preacher hit the side of the plain pine coffin with the heel of his hand. Arlo, inside, shook from the force. Walter, watching, nearly hopped out of his seat, his gaze glued to the monocle sitting over Arlo’s right eye. Arlo had worn a monocle for the last twenty years of his life, but no one seemed to notice that this one was a different color.

  “And let his life have been grand.”

  The whole town followed, repeating as though schoolchildren.

  “And let his life have been grand.”

  The old man hit the box harder. Walter flinched again, never tearing his eyes away from the jiggling glass perched above Arlo’s cheek.

  “And his family be blessed.”

  The droning chorus continued.

  “And his family be blessed.”

  Walter chanced a look at the girl in front, sitting with her family. Cordelia was the only one not smiling. While her parents seemed to always be smiling, Cordelia rarely ever was. And though Walter had seen Cordelia without a smile nearly every day for as long as he could remember, today she looked even frownier than usual. She had loved Arlo, her grandfather, more than just about anyone.

  Chernbog hit the coffin for the third time. This man must have been a boxer in his day.

  “And his crossing be peaceful.”

  “And his crossing be peaceful.”

  In a final attempt to hammer the message home, Chernbog smacked the coffin with both hands. Walter’s eyes went to the monocle, which slid slightly down the side of Arlo’s nose, jolted from the blow.

  “Amen.”

  The old preacher gave the coffin a final good-bye whack, which normally wouldn’t have been an issue, but this wasn’t a normal funeral.

  The first sign that something was off was when a light blinked up from inside the coffin. Those in the front row sensed something and leaned in to look, whispering. Then, not a moment later, a ghostly figure shot from the box, a projection that looked exactly like Arlo. Those watching from the pews, however, didn’t know anything about a projection. To them it looked as though the bright light of his spirit were hovering just above his body and he was . . . dancing?

  Chernbog stumbled backward, hand to his heart. “Mercy.”

  The specter’s long, ghastly limbs swung this way and that, into unusual, inhuman positions that made him look almost like a puppet. Yes! He looked exactly like a puppet, and if one looked close enough, they might even see the shadows of strings pulling up each of his arms and legs. Arlo paid no mind to the shocked looks before him. Instead his ghost continued to jig merrily, head lolling one way, then the other.

  It was a rather good show. But like most good shows, it went unappreciated.

  The congregation were on their feet, overtaken by uproar. Children jumped onto the benches to get a better look, tripping on their robes; wives shielded their husbands’ eyes with their long sleeves; and grandmas sat sobbing into black hankies.

  Then something shot from the coffin. It was a spring that sprang right off the forehead of Cordelia’s father, George—“Ay!”—who snatched it up and could only stare as he twisted it around. Struck by suspicion, he strode to the coffin and peered in. After a moment he yanked Arlo’s monocle free. George’s eyes squashed shut as the light beamed into his face. He dropped the monocle, and it shattered on the ground, finally extinguishing the ghostly figure.

  Mr. Primpet rubbed his eyes, looking down at the broken invention. “Ms. Mortinson? What is the meaning of this?”

  Walter thought it a shame that the question was directed to his matriarch, who was still as gobsmacked as everyone else. Walter had a brilliant answer that had something to do with an analogy about his philosophy on life and the buoyancy of ghost tummies. His analogy was never heard, however, because, on cue, Hadorah snatched him by the ear and dragged him straight out of the church, with every eye, all six hundred and thirty-one, following him, one more closely than the rest.

  Hadorah didn’t bother with any words as she threw Walter out. She shot him a single withering stare that was worse than any other he’d ever felt. She then returned inside, straightening her skirt, leaving him alone.

  The wind whistled behind Walter, causing him to shake harder than he already had been. Tears of humiliation and fear threatened his eyes, and so Walter did what he always did when he wasn’t sure of his next move. He ran to his favorite place in the world: the junkyard.

  • • •

  Pratt the cat had lived in the junkyard since kittenhood. While his brothers and sisters had all left to join various street gangs or take up in some fancy Dumpster, he had stayed. He was a junkyard cat through and through.

  He’d been born at the tippy-top of the tallest tower of garbage, in a heaping lint-filled bathtub. His mother had told him that that was why he was gray. He’d just assumed that everything from Moormouth was gray.

  The junkyard, to some, was different. It was a mishmash of every color imaginable, thrown here in a great mound of forgotten promises and misplaced dreams. Someone who didn’t know how to look at a junkyard might blend it all together and see a colorless, hilly mess, but unlike Pratt, Walter knew how to look. For him, this place was a glittering paint palette of opportunity.

  That being said, there are some places, like people, that seem downright ugly. As if the universe thought, while being created, Well, someone has to be the knee wrinkles. But the most amazing thing about such places and people is that when hit by the right light at just the right time, they look more beautiful than anything else.

  The time of beauty for the Moormouth junkyard was half
past dinner, and a quarter to bed—or, as it were, when the funerals let out. The dying rays of sun burst between piles of junk, reflecting off all the many surfaces of odds and ends. Ten to fifteen feet tall, the junkyard towers loomed over the flat factory wasteland of Moormouth beyond.

  This place was a haven for broken things, from one-eyed dolls and cracked dishware to floppy tires and forgotten footstools. That night Walter stood right in the middle of it all.

  He, however, preferred not to think of these sorts of things as “broken,” per se. For him they were just yet unreimagined.

  Walter stood atop a spindly pile and bashed the shiny bits and bobs with a broken chair leg. At one time the leg had probably been quite lovely, embellished with a floral design and a clawed foot. Now it made a great blunt object for swinging.

  Teacups exploded like fireworks. A defunct piano screeched. He struck harder and harder, as if trying to shift the pain in his heart to his hands, where he might send it careening into the trash pile. With the frustration he’d built up living in Moormouth, Walter could have done this for hours.

  Gravity had a different plan.

  Walter swung hard against an old icebox, causing a patchy gray cat to howl as he darted between Walter’s legs. Walter tripped and rolled right down the hill after him—and crashed in a tangle of limbs at the bottom.

  Hot, salty tears leaked from Walter’s eyes. He didn’t even bother to wipe them away, too overwhelmed by his own exhaustion.

  He lay there for minutes or hours—for once, without his many clocks, he couldn’t tell. But Walter knew he couldn’t stay, for fear of becoming part of the junk that was trapped there forever.

  No, it was time to go back.

  Walter willed himself to stand and clomped his weary way home.

  • • •

  Walter trudged down the dark lane toward his house, nose flaring like a bull as he breathed heavily through his fatigue, when, out of the blackness of night, a white wooden frog danced up to him. It had come from the front yard. Walter stopped to look, cocked headed and confused, at the spring-loaded amphibian. He picked it up and cradled his invention in both hands as he stared into its dull bolt eyes.

  “How did you get here?”

  The frog tried to bound from his fingers. Walter, just nimble enough, stumbled to catch him. When he looked up, he saw a trail of inventions leading around the old tree and out of sight.

  The frog scrambled desperately in his hands. It seemingly knew, in its inanimate and immaculate mechanism, that something was not right. Walter had the same feeling and numbly shoved the frog into his sock for safekeeping, just in case.

  Carefully he trod to the tree and peeked around, and was shocked by what he saw.

  The entirety of his room, save for the desk, dresser, and bed, sat in a grand mound in the middle of the browned grass between the front yard and the backyard. The pile was still alive with movement and sounds, sparking here and barking there. It undulated with the effort of hundreds of inventions, all doing what they were meant to do. It was they, the products of Walter’s hopes and imagination, that sat before him. And in front of them was Hadorah holding a very large sledgehammer.

  “I warned you, Walter. No more funny business.”

  A small frog, just like the one scrambling to escape Walter’s knee-highs, hopped toward him. Hadorah’s foot shot out and stamped on it. The frog crumpled with a pitiful whine, and though Walter was too stunned to pay attention, he would swear later that its identical brother in his sock stopped moving as well.

  “You’ve left me no other option. In six hours you will be thirteen, and I’m done, done with all of this. So, you have a choice.”

  She picked up her foot to reveal the remains of the collapsed frog. Walter pushed down the lump in his throat.

  “You do away with all of these . . . monstrosities. And agree to take up morticianing, or continue inventing and face the consequences.”

  She drew a crumpled flyer from her pocket and spread it out for him to see. It showed a picture of a gloomy estate looking over a barren hill. Above, in cheery red writing, it read: “Clawson’s Correctional Institution for Uncorrectable Children.”

  Behind her, silhouetted in the moonlight, was the same building as the one in the picture. Lightning didn’t crack behind the building, but it really ought to have.

  “I can’t save you from inventing, but maybe they can.”

  Walter pressed his fists together behind his back and willed his anger down. His face became blank, and his voice flat. “What do I have to do?”

  “It’s simple.”

  She snatched up an invention, a small metal hand that opened and shut on its own. Walter had originally hoped it could be used to hold pieces of paper together, but the hand much preferred snapping to grasping. Hadorah gingerly placed it, palm side up, on the cracked slab of rock in front of her. The fingers wiggled in hello before suddenly shooting apart as Hadorah raised the hammer above them. She then heaved the hammer down with a great crunch. Walter gasped. The hand was pulverized.

  “Destroy them all.”

  “And if I won’t?”

  “Then you will spend two years locked away on the hill.” (Again, lightning didn’t strike, but it definitely thought about it this time.)

  Walter had trouble keeping his rage at bay. Tears threatened his eyes as he looked upon the remains of his hard work. With every last bit of strength he had, he smooshed the feeling deep down into a place inside him that he was very familiar with. This was the place where he always locked away troublesome feelings that didn’t belong.

  His mother then passed the hammer to him. Its stone head met the ground with a thunk, his hand still wrapped around the handle.

  She appraised Walter, eyebrow arched. He looked only at the pile, quaking in front of him. She nudged an invention out with her foot: the grandfather clock.

  He looked to her, to the clock, and then to the hill. There was nothing he could do, nothing to invent that could save him from this, so he turned the lock inside himself, silencing his emotions squirming to be free. Then he did his very best impression of a robot.

  “No more inventing?” his mother asked.

  He nodded.

  “Then do it now,” she said.

  Walter lifted the hammer just above the clock, then let it fall; the clock smashed. He cringed at the horrible sound. Hadorah pulled the next invention out: a singing bird made from browned dandelions. Hadorah went right back to the pile—over and over again—an assembly line of horror. The next out was a humming candle, permanently lit. Forcing back the ache in his chest, Walter closed his eyes.

  He pretended to be an invention with only one function, and in a perfect display of his own machinery, he performed, dropping the hammer onto the candle.

  There was another great crash, and the candle’s light went out.

  CHAPTER 11

  •  •  •

  EXACTING ESCAPE

  As you know, to see anything in Moormouth was a task, but if you squinted hard enough, you just might have seen the Mortinson home lined with trash bags, their guts spilling out.

  A close investigator might also have noticed that the contents of these bags were rather unusual: springs, screws, bits, bobs, and every other thing that had once been part of Walter’s collection. Now they sat in the ultimate ruin of a black plastic bag.

  Inside the house boded little better.

  Walter’s room had been transformed. While it had once been alive with the squeaks and squiggles of marvelous wonders, it was now bleak and cold. The only movement was the swaying curtain, unattended to for years and half-eaten by voracious smog. The floor—unseen for nearly a lifetime—turned out to be a tightly woven, off-green carpet. Who knew?

  Little light poured into the room, because of both the midnight hour and the dense haze. But Walter didn’t need it. He moved as a boy who knows just what he’s looking for and has no time to spare.

  He needed an invention, just one, just s
omething.

  Walter had forgotten the frog in his sock because it had stopped moving entirely. This was a horrible shame, because an hour prior, Walter had been so desperate that he’d even tried to dig up the vestiges of Ralph’s bones, hoping to put them back together. But the ground had been picked clean of them.

  Then he remembered: only a few days before, he’d tried his hand at a comb that would change one’s hair color. After tinkering on it for days, his curls had been supposed to turn dandelion yellow. Instead the comb had made them glow in the dark. He hadn’t wanted that, and it had taken quite a few showers to stop his hair from attracting moths at night.

  After that, he’d dropped the comb into the trash can beneath the kitchen sink.

  The comb had been a failure then, but now it was all he had. He hoped it was still there; it had to be.

  • • •

  Walter dug through the trash. By the bottom, it seemed that there was no comb after all. Heart sinking, he made one last push. Below a pile of banana peels and coffee grounds, he felt something stiff and square.

  He pulled it out of the mess and discovered that it was a letter. The envelope was black, and the seal was gold. Walter’s breath quickened when he recognized it as the letter from the helicopter box. Then, upon closer inspection, he realized that the seal belonged to Horace Flasterborn. He flipped the envelope over. His breathing stopped entirely. On the front was his own name: Mr. Walter A. Mortinson.

  With shaking fingers he picked at the edge of the seal on the back. Time went treacherously slowly as he, as carefully as he could, pulled the little wax circle off, leaving only one small tear in the paper.

  Walter gasped as the tear grew larger, branching off into more strips that instantly curled up. He dropped the letter, as if burned, and continued to gawp. The black envelope split violently into ribbons, twirling into gold curlicues. With a final audible pop, the letter was spat out of the glittering mess.

  That’s one way to put confetti in a letter, he thought. Despite the fact that Walter could dream up at least one hundred easier ways, he didn’t much care. Nothing he imagined could top that.