text: Against the backdrop of twisting pines stands the old abandoned mech, its guts spilling out from the front of its chassis like a chaotic spider-web made of long black electrical cables and most of the cooling system. Old Missus O’Malley built the thing out of parts from about thirty different creatures, including an antique Russian tank and a nineteen-sixty-eight Oldsmobile. It stood about sixty feet tall and had a roughly humanoid design with a central body, two legs on the bottom, two arms just above the middle, and the head on top, though the head itself was really just a large plastic hamburger about three meters high and six meters wide, which used to sit atop Greasy Bob’s Burgers and Fries fast-food drive-thru. That place went out of business years ago, back when I was just a kid, and I guess one night, when the mech was nearing completion, Old Missus O’Malley had used the partially-completed war-machine to steal the giant metal burger from off the restaurant’s roof. Nobody knows exactly what she’d built it for. She’d claimed it was a prototype she’d been hoping to sell to the military, but that was obviously just a pleasant lie meant to disguise the fact that the smartest woman in town had started to go a little mad. The thing sounded like an apocalypse when she took it out for walks, the metal bits screaming against each other as the twenty-tonne monstrosity lumbered around like some drunken sailor still unadjusted to being on land. One weekend a couple of high school students, Tracy King and Janine Lakewood, stole the thing from Missus O’Malley’s backyard, and took it for a joyride across town. They squashed a police car, kicked over a fire hydrant, and scared Mister Joslin’s cat so badly the poor thing developed a bald spot. The two girls wound up getting something like a hundred hours of community service apiece, and Missus O’Malley was warned to keep a better eye on her creations. Of course it was only a month or so later that Missus O’Malley passed. She went how I think a lot of us hope to go, peacefully in her sleep, with what was later revealed to be a surprisingly large amount of LSD and PCP in her bloodstream. And it was only a week after that when lightning struck the partially completed mech, temporarily bringing the thing to life. For a day and a half it danced sadly across those big empty fields just outside of town, until eventually it came to a final halt at the edge of the woods. That’s where it took its final steps before ripping out its own internal wirings, like some sort of strange imitation of a hara-kiri ritual. Most likely, most folks agree, the lightning had simply brought the processors back online, and the mech’s dancing and death had been nothing more than the autonomic system’s misunderstanding of whatever remained of the old lady’s coding until the thing ran out of fuel and self-destructed. Still, it was sort of nice to imagine that maybe the strange creation had simply missed its creator, and had taken the opportunity granted to it by the lightning to celebrate her life and then to follow Missus O’Malley into the great nothingness that waits for us all on the other side of existence. Big Tim Roberts thought he might be able to get the thing going, that was last October, but he lost a thumb when a piece of the outer casing came loose. One Thumb Tim they call him now, but it’s not to be rude or anything; Tim actually thinks it’s pretty funny. Eventually I’m sure the city will get its act together and collect up the old thing, haul it off to the dump. But a bunch of us sorta hope they just leave it out there. So as to be like a monument. To old Missus O’Malley, and all her big, crazy ideas.