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By Ed Staskus    The day Maryann Shelly got her Lego Creative Brick Box was the day she got to work. Her Lego Man started off small, less than an inch tall, when she started building him. He didn’t stay small for long. Every day Maryann made him bigger. By the end of the month he was as big as her, which was just shy of five foot tall. Less than a month later he was eight feet tall and wouldn’t…

By Ed Staskus    Oliver was the first one out of the Jeep Cherokee the day the family turned into the parking lot of Sleeping Bear Dunes. He had been doing nothing in the car for two hours, after playing car games with Emma for hours before that. They had played I Spy, Road Trip Bingo, and the License Plate Game until his sister decided to take a nap. Doing nothing was hard for Oliver to do…

By Ed Staskus    Oliver was the first one out of the Jeep Cherokee the day the family turned into the parking lot of Sleeping Bear Dunes. He had been doing nothing in the car for two hours, after playing car games with Emma for hours before that. They had played I Spy, Road Trip Bingo, and the License Plate Game until his sister decided to take a nap. Doing nothing was hard for Oliver to do…

By Ed Staskus    Maggie Campbell’s father was a stockbroker, an investment advisor, and a vice president at Prudential Bache in the 1980s. He worked downtown with the other moneymakers. He believed in capitalism but didn’t let it go to his head. He was shrewd, keeping his greed engaged, although not always prudent. Sometimes he tripped over his sense of humor.    Everybody called him the Margin…

By Ed Staskus    I was three years old before I got my first good look at Sudbury. I didn’t know the place had started life as a railroad outpost in the nineteenth century before rapidly expanding when vast mineral resources were discovered. I didn’t know what it had become seventy years later, which was “Nickel Capital of the World.” I knew it was springtime on our street. When I looked around…

By Ed Staskus    Maggie Campbell went on birth control when she was in her late 20s. She had to be on some kind of birth control because of her polycystic ovary syndrome. As soon as she went on Norplant she broke out in bad acne. It was horrible.    “Get that stuff out of your system,” her mother Alma kept telling her. Her mother had been a nurse and knew her stuff.    After that, she put on…

By Ed Staskus

By Ed Staskus

By Ed Staskus    When Frank Gwozdz and Tyrone Walker sat down in front of Lieutenant Ed Kovacic’s desk, Tyrone had a thick sheaf of files with him. Their ranking officer behind the desk looked at them. Tyrone looked at his ranking officer. Frank looked at the windows. It was windy and raining hard. The Central Station wasn’t what it used to be. Frank watched rain leaking in through the windows.…

By Ed Staskus    Adam was a worm, at least until the day he became two worms. What happened was that Monk Kennedy, when he was digging up his counterfeit money where he had hidden it at the back of Conor Foyle’s barn, sliced Adam in half with his Army General Entrenchment shovel. It was commonly used to dig latrines, but worked for treasure hunting, too. He didn’t know he was doing it when he…

By Ed Staskus    “Yankee Doodle went to town a-riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.”    Michael Radzevicius had a bad feeling. He looked towards the Savannah River from where he was, which was a hillside north of the British fortifications, but couldn’t see it. There was a full moon somewhere but he couldn’t see that, either. It was a murky dawn. It was October…

By Ed Staskus    Maggie Campbell got ice cream for her dogs all the time. It started when she started going to her sister Elaine’s house in West Park with their family’s Rottweiler, whose name was Chavez. She took Elaine’s Rottweiler, whose name was Wellington, with Chavez for walks in the neighborhood.    The dogs and she went to the Dairy Queen on Riverside Dr. just north of Cleveland Hopkins…

By Ed Staskus    Shelly’s Lego Man started off small, less than an inch tall, when she started building him. He didn’t stay small for long. Every day Shelly made him bigger. By the end of the month he was as big as her, which was just shy of five foot tall. Less than a month later he was eight feet tall and wouldn’t fit in the house anymore. She moved him outside behind the garage, under an eave…

By Ed Staskus    Shelly’s Lego Man started off small, less than an inch tall, when she started building him. He didn’t stay small for long. Every day Shelly made him bigger. By the end of the month he was as big as her, which was just shy of five foot tall. Less than a month later he was eight feet tall and wouldn’t fit in the house anymore. She moved him outside behind the garage, under an eave…

By Ed Staskus    The Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland was all lit up the day it was dedicated in 1930. An oversized strobe light on top of the tower went round and round in circles. All through the decade the light helped ore freighters find their way to the Port of Cleveland. Airplane pilots used it as a beacon to locate the Cleveland Municipal Airport.    All the external lights were…