Short Story: The Cyclops And The Ostrich Egg

Chapter Eleven
The Cyclops and the Ostrich Egg

I spent the night wrestling with the mummy wrap, which was bad since the linen was itchy. But worse was the confined space. It made me nuts. Luckily, I heard footsteps in the hall. The door opened and Mason came into my room. “I can’t leave you alone for five minutes. What happened?”
“My mom sort of went crazy—” I started to explain. “Just unwrap me.”
“All right, stand still.” He grabbed the end of the gauze between my shoulder blades and spun me around like a top. “Cool?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
We bumped fists and headed downstairs. At the breakfast table, Mom was seated slowly slicing a grapefruit in half while scanning the newspaper. She set her knife down and turned the page. The headline blared:

“Luckily no one saw her kiss you except me, and I’m your friend, so I don’t count.”
“Never mind that,” I said, dragging him outside. “Come on.”
We followed a broad footpath trodden under the feet of slow-chewing cows that were, let’s just say, extremely messy. The path wandered along in turns and easy angles and came at last to the woods. But after reaching the shadow of the first sugar maple, it veered sharply left and bordered a creek that had been dammed up to form a swimming hole.
I stripped down to my boxers—which I’d started wearing after my atomic wedgie—and climbed up onto an overhanging dock, stretched out my arms, and dove deep into the cool water. I amused myself for some time swimming laps and floating on my back.
Mason cut through the swells like a shark, using only his hips to generate motion. Then we raced each other, and once we’d tired ourselves out, we climbed onto the shore and napped. When the sun was too hot, we leaped back into the hole, and when the chilly water made us shiver, we scrambled out again, and so it went until we finally started back to the house on sopping wet, slippery

Greene,” Mason said, blasting toward the door.
“Anytime.”
“Aiden?”
“Yeah, Dad?”
He winked at me. “Have fun, okay?”
“Absolutely not.” I winked back, even though I knew I would.

Fifteen minutes later, we were literally stumbling around a winter wonderland. Silver snowflakes floated down from the sky, and frost crept across hackberry branches. Squatting on the hard-packed, bluish-white snow was a fifteen-foot cyclops with one large yellow eye that looked like a poached ostrich egg right in the middle of his forehead. His gnarled hands and bare feet were as big as your average school bus. Despite the cold, he wore a green tank top that read: “Installing Brains, Please Wait . . .” and a teeny-tiny pink sarong.
I smiled uneasily at the super-sized beast. He smiled back, his split tongue flickering between pointed teeth.
Hang on. Split tongue? I thought and took off running toward a spindly shrub.
“AIDEN GREENE!”
My flip-flops squeaked to a halt on the ice. I took a deep breath, shaking like a leaf, and turned to face the monster.
“Where are you going?” he boomed.
“Uh . . . err . . . um.” Mason stifled a pathetic giggle. “No