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.
