ABDUCTED!

Chapter Three: Telling Stories
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I knew the person sitting across from me was not my grandpa, even through I was in my grandparent’s living room, and the person was sitting in my grandpa’s recliner. But he was not reclining with his mouth open, snoring loudly, he was not wearing a ratty cardigan sweater, slacks held up with a rope, and house slippers, and he did not have my grandpa’s familiar old-man smell. Plus, well, a guy knows his grandpa when he sees ‘em, right? This guy didn’t look like anyone’s grandpa. He just looked like one of those artist’s articulated models of a human.

I was studying the guy. Should I say something, ask him who he was, what he was doing in my grandparent’s house, what I was doing there, for that matter? Then he sort of shimmered and I thought I might recognize him. He looked a little like Grandpa Vinnie, and then he got wrinkles, a mole on his right check, and five o’clock shadow, and he looked a lot like him, and pretty soon we were talking about “old times;” me staying with my grandparents when mom and dad went to Elko to gamble, me helping Grandpa with the yard work, picking the swiss chard in Grandma’s garden. 

After what seemed like just a few minutes, Grandpa shifted in his chair and I was looking at Mr. Mattingly, my high school algebra teacher. What the hell is he doing here?

Actually, where is here? This looks like a school classroom. Mr. Mattingly used to hold me after class just to tell me that he felt I could do better. He told me that if I buckled down, I could make something of myself. He told me that understanding algebra could be useful to me someday.

It suddenly came to me that Mr. Mattingly wanted to know all about my college math courses. I couldn’t seem to stop talking, surprising myself with all the stuff I knew about math. I rattled on and on until I suddenly found myself back in the tube. I guess all that talk about math got to be boring. Just like this story, right? Well, whet happened next isn’t so boring. Not to me.

I aced my midterm in differential equations. Yeah, I was back. Everything seemed normal. Students wandering around campus, between classes. A sunny day, slight breeze, nothing out of the ordinary, but I remembered all that stuff that had happened to me and I knew I’d been abducted and I knew I wasn’t supposed to remember it, but somehow, maybe because I’d been stoned when it happened, I remembered. And I knew that my sudden genius math ability came from the aliens messing with my brain. So, okay. Now what?


Next week: On the road to Area-51