Delores Garcia Speaks

     

She said she remembered being dropped in water, like a little pool that she had never seen before. She said she couldn’t remember why she was dropped like that.  It just happened.

She remembered, she said at last, being carried in someone’s arms. He was someone she had never seen before and he was quite similar to a human, but very tall and wide.)

Around lunchtime Delores started to come around. It was like she had been avoiding thinking about it for a while. Having remembered, she was having a very hard time figuring out how to present her experiences. How can you tell your colleagues and your manfriend that you have been kidnapped by some kind of void cadets in a souped up alien hyper-drive rustbucket?

“Look,” Delores Garcia said, “I know you all are gathered here to pronounce me loopy.  But what I am telling you happened.  Oh, it happened alrighty.”  She was talking to Mike, the doctor, Bob, and some others who had squeezed into the room.  Alice Franklin arrived a bit later but heard most of it.

          “I went for a walk out beyond the wheat field, the small one behind the kitchen garden.  OK, I was mad at Mike, and I was sort of hiding a little bit.  Then I started noticing some kind of orange flowers and I was astonished to see that they looked just like California poppies, and I was bending over to pick some, and things went funny on me.

“My skirt was sucked up over my head suddenly, I couldn’t see anything, but I was in the air, and I was moving! I didn’t have time to think it through, but let me tell you guys, I was ready for war!

“Next thing I know…I landed on my butt on some kind of warm squishy surface.  My skirt fell back down into place. I saw a stinking nightmare.  But this nightmare was a stinking real one.

“It stank. It smelled like durian fruit on a bad day. It was dark, at least it looked dark to me.  I saw red lights and some junk that looked like it might be navigation doohickies. There were some tables and a bunch of equipment like I have never seen before.

“Then I saw the crew.  Wish I hadn’t seen them. They were coal black. Bipedal. Naked. No physical signs of gender, but what do I know, right?  They had thick necks, very thin mouths, and small orange eyes. They had pointed ears too. It’s obvious what they looked like to a good Catholic Mexican like me.

“Two of them, there were four total, started some kind of chitchat in sibilant shushy sounding speech. I started yelling about then and they immediately switched to Indian accented English. Guess where they learned to speak English?  Yeah, I wonder too.

“Oh miss!  We would like to help you!  Can you tell us what the problem is so that we can provide excellent service!”  And more like that. I stood up. I grabbed the first thing I saw.  A tank of some kind that wasn't nailed down and I advanced on them! It seemed to totally surprise them! What, has no one ever opposed these suckers?

“I clonked one in the head, and he went down like a 50 lb sack of flour. The other three ran behind one of those tables and started promising to address all my concerns in that weird ET/Indian version of English.

“I had them crying for mama I guess because mama arrived about then. Whatever it was floated in midair and didn’t need to trouble to actually touch things to get things done. She/it, who knows, looked like some kind of huge hideous black fetus floating in the stinky air.

“She floated me to one of those tables and tied me down somehow by stinky thoughts or something. I lay there screaming in Spanish at them.  They had no idea how to process that.

“Next thing, they want to ask me a bunch of stupid questions and I finally figured out that they were trying to understand gender/sex. I refused to tell them anything.  Why should I help them?  They told me that civilized races make new citizens by a kind of budding process. I started laughing and called them my Buddies! Well, my Buddies didn’t like human laughter at all. Mama really hated it. I think I convinced them that this particular chica wasn’t having it.

“So, they navigated back down to the surface of Athena and dumped me into that little pond, just to be mean I think. You probably don’t know this little pond.  It is quite far away from our village here. Two miles, maybe. I passed out then.

“I think they might have zapped the Slip Chute because they were mad at me!  They were just pissy like that!”

Delores took a breath.  She drank some tea. Mike sat with his head in his hands. Alice sat on the side of her bed just looking at her. Bob was thinking about what to say next. Other people were whispering to each other.

The story was leaking out of the room by word of mouth. Person to person, it spread.  Finally, people like James and Martha heard it too.

When she had finished her tea, and a glass of water, Delores continued.

“OK, you’re not going to like this any better than you liked that. I was semi-conscious, half in the water, freezing and not sure where I was. I was too dazed to do anything for myself yet. 

“Next thing I notice coming toward me was a group of some kind of “people.” They were roughly human-like, but big.  Real big. They spoke a language made of very deep tones among themselves.  I seemed to create some kind of a situation for them.  Like they felt they had to do something about me. By the way, their skin was pearly, um, it changed. Maybe with their moods or something.  Sometimes they looked pale green, sometimes bluish and sometimes sorta pink, but always changing and a little shiny. I believe they were clothed but it was not obvious how the clothing worked.

“They seemed to elect one of their number to do the honors. So, this guy, think it was a guy, sure looked like one in general, who must have been nine feet tall, came over to my pond and picked me up like a small child.  He held me in both arms quite carefully. He didn’t talk to me.  He said a word to the others in his group. Three I believe.  Then he carried me here. While you were all staring at the sky, he slipped into my office and put me carefully on the floor.

“I’m telling you, before God and man, that this is the truth.  This happened to me, Delores Garcia.”

James and Martha on Athena: James and Martha.docx