We were in a war. Using our top-secret flying truck, we pressed buttons, pulled the switches, and moved gears in our vehicle of massive destruction. We attacked anything and everything in sight. We went underwater, flew high in the sky, and drove the danger filled roads of life. We did anything to win the good fight. Anything at all, but we soon got bored.

In reality, my best friend, Aaron Miller, and I had been playing in an old beat up eighteen-wheeler truck that Louie owned. Nothing in it worked at all. We pushed the buttons, played with the steering wheel, and moved everything we could touch. Aaron usually sat in the driver's seat while I sat in the passenger seat. I liked my spot since I got to play with the switches. The switches wouldn't do anything except move, but we pretended they fired missiles, turned the truck into something else, or did whatever we wanted them to do. Life doesn't change with just the flip of a switch. Something else has to happen to change your life forever. We had no idea we were about to do something that would bring a "war."

We both literally climbed out of the truck since it was pretty huge. We walked to Aaron's grandmother's house to get a drink. I always thought it was cool that Aaron lived on the same block as his grandmother. Another neat thing, yet sort of scary at the same time, was that about half of her house stuck out over the river. When there was a low tide, Aaron and I would go under the house and see if could find some treasure. We never found much of anything other than junk, but nobody knew what we might discover.

Aaron's grandmother, Margie, was a nice lady. Almost every time I spent the night with Aaron, it was at his grandmother's house. She would usually bake some snacks for us and sometimes breakfast. While we kept her company, she kept us happy. We would do some chores, like crush cans, feed her dogs, and help her around.

We knew she wasn't home and that she was working at her job. Aaron's parents weren't home either. They were out shopping. We stepped on her deck and found a bunch of cardboard boxes. One of them was so big we could fit in it.

The box gave us an idea.

It was only a box. Who knew a simple box could hold so much power? We did. We knew all too well. We came up with an idea to scare Margie. The plan was pretty simple, but it was well crafted by our minds. I would stand out and wait until she got home to make sure she opened the box. Then Aaron would pop out, scaring her, then give her a hug because we didn't want to give her a heart attack (hey, nobody knows how someone might react).

Aaron grabbed his keys and rushed home. There he grabbed some paper to write the note and some tape to stick it on the box. The note read, "The box must be opened immediately." Aaron got in the box and I closed the box and stuck the note on top.

Next, we waited. Then we waited some more. Then a little bit longer. We couldn't wait for her to get home. We talked about how funny it was going to be. About an hour later, Aaron's brother Adam, and his friend Chris came.

"Hey, Dennis," Adam said. "Where's Aaron?"

Aaron popped out of the box. Adam and Chris weren't totally scared, but they jumped back a little bit. Aaron and I laughed.

"Man, we sure got you," Aaron told them.

"No way. We weren't scared. We knew you were there."

"Sure, whatever," I said.

"What are you guys doing anyway?" Chris spoke up.

"We're going to scare my grandma," Aaron told them. He then explained the plan to them.

"Cool! I wanna help," Adam said.

"No. This is our idea - not yours," Aaron bossed. "Now, go on. You're going to ruin everything like you always do."

"Come on, let us stay and watch."

"No."

"But, Aaron --"

Not too far away we spotted his grandmother drive toward us. Aaron ducked down and hid, chewing Adam out as he went undercover. Adam, Chris, and I stood out on the porch and waited as Margie walked toward us. Margie would later tell us that if Adam and Chris weren't around, she would've noticed something was up since Aaron was missing. She just assumed he went to the bathroom.

"Hi, boys," she greeted us.

"Hi," I said. I ripped the note from the box and handed it to her. "This package came for today."

"Oh, really?" she said as glanced at the note and then went to open the box.

She opened the box. Aaron leaped out with a roar. She jumped backward with her hands waving in the air, shrieking. After a moment later, Aaron gave her a hug as we laughed. Once her heart stopped racing a mile a minute and she got her breath back, she held on the deck railing.

"You nearly gave me a heart attack," she said with shaky hands and wobbly knees.

The urge to get revenge was stamped in her mind. Then she vowed, "One day, I will get you boys back. No matter how long it takes, even I have to come back from the grave and haunt you. I will get you back."

Her vow gave us the creeps. What did she plan to do? Just how big was it going to be? We thought of all sorts of ways she could scare us. It prepared us in way, but also made us want to make sure we would have more victories because nobody knew when she was going to strike and how.

A few weeks later, we tried to scare her with an alien mask on a broom. Aaron also brought one of those things that change your voice. We waved the mask around in her kitchen window and started saying stereotypical alien threats. After awhile, we went inside to find Margie sitting in the living room watching television. We told her about the whole plan and she laughed.

Margie never got us back for the box, and we never really tried anything after the mask. I moved away to Oklahoma after my eighth grade year in school, but I still kept in touch with them. A couple of years ago during the summer, we got together on a train and went to California. I had changed greatly since they last saw me, but we still got along just fine. Aaron and I still remembered her vow. We wondered how she was going to get us back. She had an idea, but it wouldn't scare the both of us.

At the motel, she had me sign a piece of paper. I was a bit suspicious. "But what could happen?" I thought to myself. I pulled off the pen cap and it snapped on me. I jumped a bit. It was a victory point for her, but it was a point she would soon regret.

When I got home from the trip, my mom wanted to send her a gift. She went on the web and see if she could find a local flower stop to deliver. She did and called for some flowers. She asked the flower shop if they could put a spider in flowers. To our surprise, they could and they did.

Margie was alone when she got the flowers. She kept sitting in her chair in the kitchen, admiring their beauty. Then she saw something glimmering in the leaves. She pushed the ferns and leaves aside and in the process of doing that, she jarred the spider onto her hand. She screamed and the spider flew in the air. She is deathly afraid of spiders. After she recovered her senses again, the only thought in her mind was, "I'm going to get that boy back someday or another. His time will come."

To this day the spider still rests up on an upside-down wineglass on the corner of her china cabinet, and gives her the eye. In her mind she tries to devise a scheme for that scare. She'll get Aaron and me back some day. We know it will be good. We know we won't be able to top it. We are just waiting for her to get us back.

And waiting. And waiting.


The End
Story (C) 2001 by Dennis Spielman
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