By Michael Minassian
My neighbor Bob believes in UFO’s. After a few beers, he talks about how the government was hiding information. “They have a flying saucer just outside Roswell, New Mexico. And everyone knows about Area 51,” he whispers. He paid $3000.00 for a high powered telescope and set it up in his attic. Last year, he and his wife Sara went to a UFO convention in Miami and came back wearing matching tie-dyed t-shirts with a little green man driving a beach buggy on the front.
A few days ago, Bob banged on my door at 6 AM. He said Sara was missing, probably abducted by aliens. “Her purse is still there and her phone. She never goes anywhere without her phone. She must have been levitated right out of our bed while I was sleeping.” Bob bent over at the waist and sucked in big gulps of breath.
“Take it easy, Bob. You don’t want to hyperventilate.”
“What am I gonna do? I can’t go to the cops. They won’t believe me.”
“Wait until she comes home. You can stay with me.”
“No, no, thanks. I better stay home in case she comes back. I mean, when she comes back.”
She was gone for two days. Bob told me she came home in an Uber, stumbled out of the car with torn stockings, minus her shoes, and wearing a red dress two sizes too small. “And her hair was cut short,” Bob whined. “She loved her long hair, spent hours brushing it. Now it’s chopped around her ears, like, what you call it, a pixie cut.”
At first, I thought his story about alien abduction was a cover for a case of infidelity or some other domestic issue. But Sara seemed different. I’d see her wandering around looking up at the sky. When I said good morning, she smiled and stared at me as if we had never met. I never heard her say another word again except for the night she looked up at the top branches of the tree on the corner and screeched at the green parrots that had built a nest there. No words, really, just a steady squawk that quieted the parrots.
The next day, Bob knocked on my door again and asked me if I had seen, Jonah, their black lab. Bob’s theory was that the same aliens that had abducted Sara had come back for their dog. A couple of days later, Jonah showed up in the middle of the night, howling at the full moon and waking up half the neighborhood.
In the morning as I was leaving for my run, Bob sprinted over. “You gotta come see this,” he blurted. “Come on, follow me.” We walked into his house into the small den where he had a desk, computer, and a built-in shelves crammed with books.
“You see that? Do you see?” pointing at the shelves.
“Jeez, Bob, you finally organized your library.” The last time I had been here, the shelves were a hopeless jumble of books. Now they were neatly arranged.
“It wasn’t me…it was Jonah.”
“C’mon, Bob. How could a dog? Are you sure Sara didn’t sneak in here while you were asleep?”
“I saw him. I came in here and saw him put the last few books on the shelf. Spilled my damn coffee all over myself. He had a book in his mouth, put it on the shelf, then another, then another.”
“Did Sara see this?”
“Sara? Sara hasn’t been the same since she came back. Do you know where she is now? In the backyard, watching the sky. Do you want to see what she did in our bedroom?”
I followed him and stopped short in the doorway. The bed was unmade, Sara’s bras and panties were strewn all over the floor, and one wall was covered in a mathematical formula.
“What do you make of that?” Bob asked.
I looked at the numbers scrawled on the wall and shook my head. “I don’t know Bob, I’m no math genius.” I took another look and pointed. “See that on the left, E = mc2, Einstein’s theory of relativity. I don’t know what Sara is doing with it. Maybe she’s proving it. Or maybe she’s deconstructing it?”
Bob sobbed. “She always said she was never any good at Math and Science. She teaches French at Broward College, you know that.”
I didn’t know what to say. If Sara wasn’t capable of these complicated formulas, I didn’t think Bob had done it. He sold cars at the Mazda dealer on State Road 7.
That night, I woke up to a low pitched humming sound. It felt like the whole house was vibrating. Then it stopped and everything was quiet. In the morning, it was a typical summer day in South Florida: hot and humid. The only thing that seemed odd was that the green parrots had moved from the tree in front of Bob and Sara’s house to the palm tree on my front lawn. I could hear them squawking and complaining to each other right outside my window.
I wondered what was going on at Bob’s. After lunch, I knocked on the door, and it swung open. I walked around, then checked the bedrooms upstairs. It looked the same as it had the day before, but there was no sign of anyone. When I left, I shut the door tight. The parrots in front of my house were strangely quiet until I got back to my house.
A few days later, I went back, knocked, waited, then opened the door and went inside. Still no one. I found my way up to the attic and carried Bob’s telescope to my house. Most nights now I spend a couple of hours looking through the telescope, searching and waiting, watching for someone or something to show up. The humming in my ear gets a little louder every day.
* * *
Michael Minassisan is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His short stories have appeared recently in Impspired, Flash Boulevard, and 10 by 10. He is the author of three poetry collections as well as a chapbook of poems Jack Pays a Visit, released in 2022. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com