Another Story by Dave Materna!

Other

I know what I was supposed to look like. I know what he wanted me to look like— big tits and long legs in lean black jeans with stiletto boots and a black leather jacket snug across my boobs with Ray bans and wild long black hair.

`

But I don’t look like that. Yet,anyway. Right now I’m sixteen years old and I love power-pop punk and Chuck Taylors and baggy sport coats. I’m five foot three with a blonde pony tail and “Abercrombie” on my sweat-pant ass. I smell like lilac soap and I might start smoking cigarettes. I think he hates me, but he’s gonna hafta listen to this.

~

I wait tables sometimes at Johnny’s ‘Getti Shack and one night I stayed to help the dish washer finish up. I kinda liked him, ya know. So I was helping out and it was real late when we left. As I walked to the back door, I felt a rumble like a big truck goin by, a woosh like a jet, that lasted a few seconds, maybe, like five or ten, but by the time I put my jean jacket on and went outside it was gone. So was my dishwasher-boy.

~

It smelled like motor oil or gas burning with rotten eggs. I mean, it sucked. And there was mist all over the parking lot, but it smelled like smoke. Foggy, rotten-egg-smoke. Then I saw this couple just sitting there, staring straight ahead.

~

“Jesus Christ,” the bug-eyed girl hissed,” Did you see that?” Jesus Christ no I did not. She stood up from her seat on a parking lot concrete stop and came up next to me. Her boyfriend got up and stood beside her. He was kinda fat and sweaty. He wondered if I’d seen it too and by then the smoke was gone but it still stunk bad. The girl took my arm and yanked me along with her and started talking.

~

“We were just sitting in the car talking,” she was saying,”when these two cars pull up. They pull up on either side of us and two people, or what we thought were human people, got out of the cars. Then they walked over to that drum—see that drum over there?” She pointed to the other end of the parking lot. I could make out a big old barrel leaning in the shadows. It kinda glowed and it was smoking, like it was real hot. The bug-eyed girl said her name was Lilly. She kept talking.

~

“Anyway, the man was really tall, I mean really tall like seven feet and the girl was well I guess just a girl. A woman. They didn’t really look at us—I don’t think they knew we were here. At first.” Lilly pointed to their car. “We were sitting in the car freaking out.” She was really starting to freak ME out. Lilly had me by the arm and then she put her arm around my waist and the boyfriend took my right arm by the wrist. We walked across the parking lot to the smoking barrel. Lilly looked up at the sky.

~

“This is where they stood,” Lilly explained. They held me tight. “This barrel, right here, this one started to glow, and it got hotter. The tall guy stood here with the woman.” She brought me closer to the barrel. It was an old fifty gallon drum and I could really smell it now. The man was holding on to me for dear life.

~

“We better go back to the car,” Lilly said. I had my little red Honda and I wanted to go back to it too.

~

“But we gotta tell you what happened.”

~

So I hiked up my pants and sat on the hood of my car to listen.

~

“We just sat in the car watching and the tall man took the woman and held her hands with the barrel between them, held hands around it, and as we sat there, no shitting, there was a blast-off from the barrel—I can’t describe it any other way”

~

The fat, sweaty guy spoke up and let go of my hand. I wiped my hand on my shirt and started to get into my car. His sweaty drops fell on me, God. He said, “The light from the barrel that blasted up, into the sky, higher and higher until the clouds lit up”—“Yeah,” Lilly cut in, “Like a thunder storm...” The sweaty fat guy was wetter and wetter and said, “He blasted her off into space.”

~

That’s when they let go of me. That’s when they let go of me and said how the tall guy came up to their car and put his hands on the hood and he was so tall he could lean all the way up to the windshield.

~

Lilly said, “All he did was wag his finger at us. Like he was saying ‘Don’t ever, ever tell a soul.’ That’s all he did.”

~

There was my car and their car and one other car left in the parking lot. The extra one was the woman’s who went up to heaven, I think. The fat sweaty guy held on to my hand when the headlights, then the cars came and I tried to roll up the window.

~

Two of them again.