By Bob Cartlege
“Dad, I’m home!” Barley cried.
“Barley! Excellent timing!” Filbert’s voice came from the cellar. “I’m just about to revolutionise—”
BOOOM!
The house shook hard enough to knock over the chairs at the kitchen table. Faint wisps of smoke curled out from under the cellar door.
“Explosion from the cellar? It must be Tuesday,” Buddy observed with a grin.
“Funny. Very funny,” Barley replied, giving his best friend Buddy the look. “Dad! Are you okay?” he cried.
The cellar door swung open, releasing a thick cloud of blue-grey smoke. Emerging from the pall came Filbert Awlright, mad scientist and Barley Awlright’s father. “I think I might have confused the temporal phase inverter and the thermal pulse regulator,” he coughed.
“What were you attempting to create that would require the manipulation of both time and thermal energy, Dr Awlright?” Fen the alien house guest asked, his enormous pearlescent eyes widening in surprise and alarm.
“Well as I was saying, I am, or was, on the verge of revolutionising the pop-up toaster. Think of it. Just think of it! A toaster that popped out hot toast the instant you inserted the bread!” Filbert began enthusiastically but broke off when he saw Barley giving him the look. “Unfortunately, when I was adjusting the temporal inverter to near-instant cooking time I seem to have shorted the thermal pulse regulator and, umm…”
“Blew up the toaster,” Barley finished folding his arms across his chest. Filbert nodded. “Again, Dad? I thought we agreed you weren’t allowed near the toaster anymore? You know, so I could maybe have some toast one day?”
“Well, yes, but…” Filbert began, hesitating slightly.
“But?” Barley prompted.
“But I am sure this new toaster will mean a revolution in the breakfast experience!” Filbert said enthusiastically.
“I’m sure it would, Dad,” Barley said, “But you are banned from tinkering with the toaster. You agreed. The contract you signed is still stuck on the fridge door.”
Filbert threw his hands in the air. “Oh, this is ridiculous!” he snapped. “One or two little mistakes and—”
“Little?!” Barley asked, stunned. “Dad! What about the time you started cooking toast in the morning and twelve hours later there was a black hole in the kitchen sink?”
“Okay, yes, perhaps a little…” Filbert began, but was interrupted by Barley.
“And let’s not forget the ‘intelligent’ toaster.”
“What was wrong with that?!” Filbert demanded indignantly. “Anything you cooked in it came out a perfect gold brown all over. It worked perfectly!”
“It worked perfectly… when it was in the mood. But if you tried to toast English muffins when it wanted to do crumpets it would spit them out and sulk, refusing to toast anything!”
“Well—” Filbert started.
“And finally, let us never forget the ‘Everhot Toasting Solution’?”
“What was wrong with that? The toast stayed hot.”
“Oh yeah, it stayed hot alright. It’ll be ‘hot’ for another twenty thousand years! Because it’s radioactive!” Barley exclaimed, loosening his school tie with a yank. “Who would think cooking toast with a blast of gamma rays was a good idea?”
Filbert’s shoulders sagged. “Okay, okay. You’ve made your point,” he sighed in resignation. He slowly righted one of the kitchen chairs and slumped into it.
Barley ran a hand over his short-cropped red hair. He placed an arm around his father’s shoulders. “Dad, your work has advanced humanity in fields from chemistry to physics to medicine and even needlepoint. Maybe let someone else do the toasters?”
About the Author
Bob Cartledge
Bob writes about himself:
As a lad I was an indifferent reader, and rarely picked up a book unless I had to. It turned out that my problem was a major hearing deficit. I couldn’t understand what was being said to me, so I couldn’t match word text to word sounds.
One day, my father sat down and started reading to me from the book in his hand. I was captivated. Every day I would go back, sit on my father’s knee and he would read to me. Then one day, he said no.
No, he would not read to me. No, he would not tell me how the story went. No, if I wanted to know how the book finished, I would have to read it myself. So I did. I read that first book for a month to get it finished.
It took me a month to finish the next four books in the series.
Since then I have inhaled books, I have learned to love reading.
Finally, inspired by the works of my favourite authors, I started to write. I have dabbled in poetry, horror, fantasy, science fiction, all manner of speculative fiction. I hope one day to see a novel in a book shop and say, ‘I wrote that. That’s mine!’
Our weekly podcast features the stories from recently published issues, often narrated by the authors themselves.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
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