General Fiction Short Stories

The Hideous Mr. P (Contest)

 MoonWolf_16               April Challenge 2018 in "Develop Your Writing Competition" .. Prompt: Write in a genre you've never written in before and include a shadow and a bird. (2000 max.)

*I chose "Mystery". I've never written one before and, now, I may ever write one again! LOL .. My story takes place on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada. The picture above is of the famous Head Harbour Lightstation at the northern tip of the island. I didn't take the pic. I just found it on the web .. =)

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Nana called. Mr. González's pelican had gone missing.

I wanted to laugh and say good riddance to the ugly thing but I knew better. Nana and Mr. González had been neighbours for many years and they were the best of friends. She would be mortified if I didn't take this seriously. After all, the pelican had been a gift from his dead wife, Winnie, who was an islander and my Nana's best friend since grade school.

"I can catch an early ferry tomorrow and be there about mid-morning," I told Nana. "I'm sure I can find it," I said with confidence.

Of course, this was the last thing I wanted to do on my one day off this week, but it was my nana calling and I never said no to Nana.

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Finding Mr. González's pelican, which was a four foot tall wood carving that usually stood in the middle of his front lawn, turned out to be much more difficult then I initially thought it would be.

The first place I searched was Mr. González's own yard, including his baby barn, garage and the woods behind his house. It was hard to know whether Mr. P, that was the nickname the pelican was given by all the locals, had gone missing or had just been misplaced by a forgetful old gentleman. But all I found was mosquitoes - swarms of them.

Hot and itchy, I retreated from the woods to the neighbourhood. Nana had told her neighbours, mostly aging retirees, that I was coming. They came out, one by one, to greet me as I walked into their yards asking for permission to search around for Mr. P.

If teens or vandals had drug Mr. P off under the cover of darkness, they probably didn't get very far because he weighed a hefty sixty pounds or more. Carting him any distance would have been a two-person job for sure. So, it was possible that the monstrosity might have been discarded in the woods close by.

I didn't have too much ground to cover. There were only eight houses on the street and I was able to search the back yard of seven homes. The eighth house belonged to a new neighbour. A young man who had bought the place two summers ago, I was told.

No one knew much about him. Well, nothing much more than his life history, of course. Before I reached his driveway I knew it too - his name, age, marital status, place of birth, where he went to university, the last job he worked on the mainland, what brought him to the island, and more. Ya, they didn't know much about him at all, I thought with a laugh. He was at work though. So, I'd have to wait until he got home to ask him if he'd seen Mr. P anywhere.