Wednesday, May 15, 2019

COMPLETE THE STORY: 11 of 198

It flashed through the sky and then was gone. Lucy was sure she had seen a UFO and was equally sure aliens were here to secretly make contact with a human being. Maybe they would choose her. Maybe she would get to visit their ship.  Maybe they would take her to their planet and she would be the first human being to ever visit. She had always had an obsession with aliens and outer space.  Really anything to do with science fiction.  Perhaps it was because her life on earth had been rather mundane and uneventful. A rambling woman, who never spent more than a few years anywhere she lived.  Grew up in Maine, then it was on to New York. Left the Big Apple for the Big Easy for a three year stint in New Orleans. Then it was on to a more simple life of small town Alabama.  Four years of that, and she found herself in suburban Chicago.  Now she was in nowheresville, Montana, her sixth of what she referred to as, “Where I live” and yet to find what she could call home.  No matter where she went, she always felt unwanted and out of place.

Lucy was an odd girl growing up.  Her father was a trucker who often spent weeks on end away from home. When he came back he spent most of his time catching up on sleep life on the road rarely allowed him.  When he was awake, he was watching football or baseball. To him time was precious, and he’d rather spend it with television and beer, than with his daughter.  It was clear to Lucy that he had wanted a son and that he resented her for not being one.  To try and gain his approval she went out for basketball and surprised herself by making the team.  She was so excited to tell him that she called his cell phone and left him a message.  A message that he would never return.  He was killed when his truck hit a patch of black ice causing him to fall into a ravine.  It happened in Illinois, not far from where she lived during her time in Chicago.  She always wondered if he had heard her voicemail before he had gone off the road that night. She hoped that he had.  That maybe he had listened to it and for the first time in his life smiled at the thought of his daughter. 

She never attended another basketball practice after that.  She failed to see the point. The only reason she had gone out in the first place was because she thought it would make her father happy.  While the coach understood and empathized with Lucy’s decision the girls on the team did not. They considered her to be a quitter and her self departure got her a permanent ban from their kliq.  Had she stayed out for basketball that year in seventh grade, her life would have turned out differently.  She would have been popular among the girls, and noticed by the boys.  Instead by the time she was a senior, there were kids who had thought she had moved.

She was never invited to parties or get togethers.  She never went over to anyone’s house. No one ever came to her’s.  She was simply the kid who’s mother went loony after her husband died in a trucking accident. The kid who shut herself off from the rest of the world, who never learned to cope with her father’s death.  That’s how the fixation with science fiction began. 

Her grandfather had her go through all of her father’s things that he had been keeping at their house. She found a collection of old films that he had owned as a kid.  One of them was E.T. a famous film from the early 1980’s about a lonely boy who befriends a lost alien who had accidentally been left on earth.  She fell in love with the idea and hoped one day she might get to meet an E.T. 

She also knew the stories of the not so friendly aliens.  The type that came to Earth not to make friends but to wipe us out or do painful experiments on us.  At this point even that seemed like a refreshing alternative compared to the life she was living.  Or if anything at least it seemed more exciting. 

She was more into the idea of making a friend.  She fantasized about showing an alien around earth and teaching them about our planet and our ways.  She fantasized about traveling with him and learning about where he was from and how they did things.  Maybe there she’d be important. Maybe there she’d be well liked and popular.  Or if it had to be where the aliens weren’t friendly, maybe she’d be the one to come up with a master plan on how to defeat them the way Jeff Goldblum did in INDEPENDENCE DAY. 

For now though, she was just a 32 year old nobody looking up at the sky continuing to wish that the flash she had seen would come back.  It most likely wouldn’t, but it was nice to think that maybe it would. 

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