Dear Dad,
I have about 30 minutes left to tell you everything I need to say, and there’s no way it’s enough. God, I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll just dive in with a couple of minutes of background information, how I got to be typing this letter right now, and then I’d better get straight to the message I’m supposed to deliver. That’s the important part, but it also seems pretty important (to me, anyway), that you have some reason to believe that I haven’t gone completely out of my mind and run off to Belize like I always talked about doing.
This symbol means negation. This isn’t part of the message per se, but they say it’s important for you to know this if you’re going to understand all the rest.
No time for the whole story, so here it is in a nutshell: I was sitting on the picnic table on the patio, and I heard a noise down in the woods, a kind of crackling sound. Yeah, okay, I was smoking a joint. I don’t have time to clean my room, so that’s not the worst thing you’re going to find out about me soon. (Let’s leave it at, “Sorry! I’m only human!” I think you’ll understand.)
Here’s the first part of the message:
This symbol (as near as I can remember) means skein, but they also want you to understand it to mean origin, seed, river, andmemory.
As soon as I got up and started walking down to the fence at the bottom of the yard, that brutal floodlight on the Meltons’ deck came on. It lit up the woods so you could see the silver of the birch trees and the shadows of the trees, and more silver where the leaves on the ground were wet, and some other strange shadows I couldn’t sort out to make sense of what was casting them. And all of a sudden I knew (without exactly knowing what I was seeing) that there was someone coming through the woods toward me.
This symbol means star as well as grain/sand, fullness, and
All I can tell you about what happened after that is a bunch of impressions, a lot of words that don’t make a whole lot of sense, and then these symbols that I can’t get out of my head. I’m sure it was 9:30 when I turned off the TV and went out back to get high. Next thing I knew, I was in my room again, and it was 6:30—right after supper, the moment you closed the garage door on the way to your meeting. I spent an hour and a half lying on my bed listening to Pink Floyd, just like I’d done the first time. Then the phone rang, and I had a hunch it was going to be Jalene, and it was. As soon as I picked up the phone I knew she was going to say, “Hi Jim, what’s cooking?” And then I knew the next thing she was going to say, and the one after that, and then I told her I’d have to call her back later. And I got off the phone and went out in the backyard, but there was nothing to see. And then I frittered away an hour I couldn’t afford to waste—taking a shower, eating some butter pecan out of the carton, staring at the glass in the sliding glass doors to the patio, with a feeling somewhere between déjà vû and those dreams you have before you’re 100 percent asleep.
Okay, now I have about 15 minutes, and I’ve only delivered half the message. Here’s some more:
This one means embrace. There’s also something in there about continuity, connectedness, and return.
Oh, and
Long story short: I was kidnapped by someone or something. They took me away for what might have been days, maybe weeks. They gave me a message to give to everyone else in the world. They brought me back here, and they gave me three hours to put my affairs in order. Now I’ve pissed away two and three-quarters hours, and I need to deliver the message before they come back and take me away for good.
God, I can’t imagine why they gave this message to me, if it means as much as they seem to think it means. Why would they want a fat, lazy, asthmatic comic-book artist to transcribe a once-in-a-millennium postcard to the human race? Why didn’t they pick a real writer, or at least someone who fits the profile of a space adventurer—a mountain climber with a bestselling memoir, a base-jumping journalist, or maybe an astronaut who writes poetry?
This glyph means path, and sword, distant,
Believe it or not, that’s it, Dad. It was their idea that I should address this letter to you, by the way. They seem to have worked out that you’re the person who’s most likely to find it, and that you’ll know how to get it into the right hands.
The light is on again in the back yard. Tell Mom I love her, and even if the message doesn’t make a bit of sense to me, I know there’s nothing to be afraid of. I don’t know when we’ll see each other again, but I’m sure we will.
P.S. I feel certain that they are as far beyond us as we’re beyond the first creatures that crawled up on the beach. But they love us anyway! (That’s me talking, not them.)
Note: The assignment was to write a letter to the world. I have strayed a bit from Max’s intent, perhaps. This story came to me in flashes at 11:00 at night while I was walking at Memorial Park, completely hopped up on caffeine after dinner with two of my favorite readers at Latina Café. I couldn’t rest until I came home and wrote it. Weird, huh?
I posted this exercise out of sequence, then went back and finished Exercise #11. I had to get this one written down before I forgot what I had in mind. But it bugged me too much to have #11 after #12, so I went back and fudged the time-stamps to put them in the right order.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
I’m stunned. What an interesting story! You are turning out to be a fantasy/sci-fi writer after all. (You may be writing Star Trek fan fiction soon! HA!) What a great premise – an alien abduction story from a totally new angle. What happens when they bring the guy back with instructions on a temporary reprieve? Very unusual, very unique – I love it!
I need some more help with the glyphs/message action. It has a feel like you were imbedding a story or a lesson, etc. in the story, and not just one the “aliens” sent, but one you are sending. But I think I am missing it. I like the switch from one to the other and back. I just think I’m not getting exactly what you are saying with the alien symbol part of the story.
Regardless, I really like this one. Another glancing blow to the assignment topic, but I love what you came up with. An amazing read. This sentence is great – “Why would they want a fat, lazy, asthmatic comic-book artist to transcribe a once-in-a-millennium postcard to the human race?” It’s great first because everything before that made “fat, lazy, asthmatic comic-book artist” seem exactly right. It absolutely seems like it is coming from that guy. Second, summing up the assignment with the rest of that sentence is fabulous. The phrase “a once-in-a-millennium postcard to the human race” is excellent – how better to describe the one message left for us silly humans as a clue to figure out life from the incredibly advanced beings?
I REALLY like this idea. You should write while walking more often. G.
You caught my attention, again. I paused (no — I WILL not say it), had to return to the first part, re-read it, move on again. I thought, “Huh?” and “What?” and still kept going because I knew the writer was not going to disappoint me.