Lights in a New Mexico Sky (standard:science fiction, 2297 words)
Author: Bart Meehan	Added: Jun 15 2004	Views/Reads: 3169/2037	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A story about two people living in New Mexico. Set in a bar, where the characters are watching a neighbour from their trailer park being interviewed on TV, about a video he captured of UFOs. This becomes the background for a review of their own lives.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

some sort of government agent.  That fuelled his integration, to a 
point where I was about to toss him out of my trailer.   Then Terri 
turned up.  She knocked on the door, stuck her head in and said 
something like:  you haven't forgotten that I was coming over, have 
you?   I was confused but had enough sense to know a rescue when I saw 
one.   I told Gene we'd have to catch up another time and pushed him 
out the door, while pulling Terri in.   Gene stood in my little garden 
for a moment, wondering what had happened, then wandered back to his 
trailer, with a slightly annoyed look on his face. 

“We're not all like that.” Terri said, then smiled “ By the way, why are
you here?” 

Gene was on the television.   His was the second story, after a couple
of soldiers who had been killed in an ambush in the Middle East. 

Terri was right.  I couldn't hear the news reader, but the captions at
the bottom of the screen were enough. 

Under Gene:  filmed UFOs. 

Gene looked earnest as he answered questions.  When they cut back to the
reporter, instead of the normal smirk that accompanied these stories, 
there was excitement. 

The caption changed:   Clearest images captured to date.   Government
has asked for a copy of the video. 

The scene cut from the interview to Gene's tape.   As it began to roll,
I sat forward.  The noise in the bar subsided and people turned to look 
at the television.  It was shot during the day – that was unusual.  
Normally they were grainy night shots of dancing lights.  But these 
were more than lights.   They were metal balls, three of them.  With 
nothing to gauge them against, it was hard to tell if they were 
baseball size or football field size.   They move quickly through the 
camera's field of vision, slowing only once as if they wanted to look  
at Gene, then they were gone. 

The noise in the bar resumed, as the story returned to the reporter
standing in front of the trailer park sign.   The name, ET – ville, was 
visible over his shoulder, along with the comments underneath – “more 
sighting and alien abductions than any other park in the State” 

“You ready for some fresh air” 

Terri grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the booth.  We walked through
the bar and into the parking lot out the back. 

I think I was closer to her than she was to me.   That was just her way
– there was always some distance, something in her life not revealed.  
I think in the first month of our friendship, she knew everything about 
me.  My family, my father's constant look of disappointment, my first 
unsuccessful attempt at straight sex and my even less successful 
attempt, at gay sex.   Anything I found out about her was revealed 
slowly, in disjointed memories that I had to put together later. 

The potted biography: she'd come from California, product of a broken
family.  She' been married twice, both ended badly. The first produced 
a son, who was drinking at fifteen and had runaway at eighteen (with 
all the money in her purse).   She hadn't seen or heard from him in six 
years.   She liked New Mexico, she liked the climate and the fact 
people, for the most part, kept the conversations short.   She worked 
as much overtime as she could get, hoping to have enough to trade up 
from the trailer one day.   (Though I thought the work meant she didn't 
 have that much time to think about her life, past and present. ).   
She didn't have many friends – in fact, she spent most of her spare 
time with me.   My reason was that I liked talking to her.  I really 
didn't know her's. 

Terri climbed onto the hood of a pick up, leant back and looked at the
stars. 

‘Can you believe that Gene” she said “ Someone was telling me he'll make
a couple of hundred thousand from selling that film” 

I shrugged, propped myself against the driver's side door and lit a
cigarette. 

“That'll make some televangelist happy” 

She laughed, then leaned across and took the cigarette out of mouth. 
She puffed on it once, but didn't inhale, then crushed it out on the 
heal of her shoe. “I don't know why you don't give up” she said 

“It's about the only vice I have these days.” 

A couple of guys came out of the bar, arguing about some football match
in the distance past.   They found their car, sat in side and turned up 
the radio.   Springsteen blasted across our conversation for moment, 
then disappeared with their tail lights, into the street. 

“Do you believe that film?” 

Terri shifted a little, looked uncomfortable. 

“I guess I want to believe.  How about you?” 

“ Sure.  The same, but you know me.  I'm a born sceptic.”  I looked up
at the sky and saw, the flashing lights of a passenger jet moving 
through the stars “When I was a kid, and my dad and I still got on, he 
took me to a play.  Off Broadway.   It was by an Irish guy called 
Brendan Behan and it was about a man who was waiting to be executed.  
The called him the Quare Fellow, but you never saw him in play just the 
guards and other prisoners.  The whole thing was about how the 
execution affected them.   I remember this scene where a guard is 
speaking to a prisoner the night before the execution  – I memorised 
the lines.  He says, it's a great night for the stars.  If there is 
life on any of them I wonder if the same things happen there.  Then he 
talks about some poor slob on another planet waiting to be hanged and 
looking out of his cell and looking at our earth and moon for the last 
time.”  I stopped a minute, and thought about that night with father.   
Afterwards he'd taken me to a pub, and bought me a lemonade, while he 
drank Guinness.  We listened to an Irish band and though we didn't 
talk, it probably the happiest we'd even been together.   I hadn't 
spoken to him in years and probably never would again. 

“There was a time in my life when all I wanted was to be on another
planet”  I said.  “I figured it couldn't be worst that here.   I even 
took something once, figured that if I died, I might wake up somewhere 
else” 

“What happened?' 

I shrugged.  “I don't know what they were, but I just threw up for a
couple of days” 

Terri was quiet for a while, then lay back on the hood of the pick up. 

“Did I ever tell you about my father?” 

She'd told me something.  Not much, just how he left when she was ten
and she'd never seen him again. 

“My dad was a drunk, a bad one” 

I nodded 

“That happens” I said. 

“He wasn't always like that.   When I was little, he was best man in
world.  Always there, looking after mom and me.   Then he changed” 

She stopped for a moment.  I knew she was thinking whether she wanted to
finish the story.   She was like that.  Sometimes she would start to 
let you into parts of her past, then changed her mind and the subject. 

But not tonight 

“I was eight years old, when he disappeared.  He was gone for a couple
of weeks, and then they found him wandering on some back road, hundreds 
of miles away.  Here, actually.  In New Mexico.   For awhile he didn't 
know who he was, so they kept him in some state hospital.    When his 
memory finally came back, they shipped him home.   I remember being so 
excited.   We thought we'd lost him forever and this was like some sort 
of resurrection.   Except it wasn't.   When he walked through the door, 
I could tell” 

She paused again, so I prodded 

“What?” 

“He was different.  It was like something had been drained out of him. 
He just looked nervous and was sweaty all the time.   Then he started 
drinking and that made him angry.   First he only argued with my 
mother, then he started hitting her” 

“He ever hit you?” 

She shook her head. 

“The police came around a couple of times and then the minister.  It was
him who started my father talking, though I think he was sorry he did, 
when he heard what Dad said.   He told us that he'd been pulled up by a 
light into this giant ship.  That  he'd spent weeks there while they 
probed him and watched him.   Then they dropped him off on that road.   
I remember him telling the minister that the worst thing was that they 
didn't say a word to him.  Not one word about where they came from.  
Why they were here.  And so now all he had were these questions that he 
couldn't get out of his head”   She sat up again, looked relieved, 
unburdened.  “ Sounds like a Spielberg movie doesn't?” she said. 

I nodded, lit another cigarette.  This time she didn't try to take it. 

“I guess he's got to get his inspiration from somewhere”  I said. 

“He left when I was ten – a week before my birthday.   Just like my kid.
  Never heard from him again.  I always thought that maybe they'd come 
back for him.   Or maybe he's just some drunk living on the streets 
somewhere” 

“Is that why you came to New Mexico?” I asked. 

She thought about it for moment, then shrugged. 

“I don't know.  I just can't get over Gene seeing those goddamn things. 
I've been here as long as him and never seen anything.  Not one goddamn 
light in the sky” 

She slid off the hood, and stood there looking up.  There was another
plane moving across the sky. 

“You think aliens have flashing tail lights?” she said, smiling. 

“Who knows.  They have to indicate some how, I guess” 

She took my arm. 

“Time to go back to the mines”  She grabbed the remains of the cigarette
out of my mouth, with her free hand. 

“You'll never go to heaven if you smoke” she said and then walked me
back to the bar. 

The end 


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