prompt: lock, title: lock stock and barrel in misc. flash fiction

The mythological creature as tourism hook is hardly new, of course. Shysters have been selling crude plesiosaur carvings at Loch Ness in Scotland since the 500s, before the word “plesiosaur” was invented, before anyone could even consider the differences betwixt dragons and dinosaurs. Some teenager floats an empty oil barrel with an above-ground swimming-pool hose in the loch every couple decades and, barring a global pandemic, those rubes will just keep soaring on in.

But lately, everyone’s getting in on it. Someone saw an unwashed hobo in the New Jersey Pine Barrens once and eventually The Jersey Devil became such a draw that they named their damn hockey team after it. A couple methamphetamine tweakers imagined a bear with glowing eyes and wings, it didn’t even take decades for The Search for the Mothman to become the first and only reason for a human being to set foot in West Virginia. All it took was a floating stump of drift-wood for Lake Champlain to get in the game, lower cigarette taxes than New York could only buoy Vermont’s viability for so long, after all. Why not pretend there’s a giant fish there.

Our little settlement along the Erie Canal could use some acceleration on the plans to increase tourism, yeah? So why not us? Here’s the plan: Little Falls, home of Earth’s Smallest Cryptid, Sal the Lock 17 Monster. The pun’s right there! A canal lift-lock, the Scottish lakes are called “loch”, they sound almost identical. We’re leaving money on the table every second we aren’t moving on this charmingly cynical exploitation of those who’d think we are all gullible hicks, flipping their devotion to ironically enjoying what they’d consider intellectually beneath them.

In the time it took you to read that last paragraph, we lost five grand. Let’s just get on this. Sal, that will get the history obsessives who remember the song about the canal-mule ‘Sal’. Sal can be a nickname for either Salvatore or Sally, that markets well demographically. Doubles those toy sales, pink Sal, blue Sal, one Sal, two Sal. Making it small plays up the cute factor as well.

Moreover, that’s why no one had discovered it yet, it was so small. A sea monster the size of a moderate dog, they’ll love it. The li’lest cryptid! They’ll have a cartoon called Monster Babies and we’ll all get a dip. It will be like Alaska where everyone gets a cut of the oil money just for living there. Why should Transylvania and Oregon get all the fun with their Draculas and their Apemen? All we have to do is start pretending Sal’s real and then everyone will start throwing cash at us, so they can laugh at us for thinking that Sal’s real. Hoist them by their own petards.

Just strap a bicycle inner-tube to an old beer keg, float her down the Erie and let them punish us for our quaint ignorance with great gushing hailstorms of money. I mean, it’s the American way.