The following is my entry into the 7th Flash-Style Flash Fiction Battle. For more details, check it out below:
Prompt: 20 years ago. In a taxi. The driver was telling you about aliens in his cab. back to today, same cab, same driver
You're mighty lucky I answered the phone, mister. You might have been up you-know-what creek with no paddle.
Yes, sir. Not too many cabs operating up here in these mountains. Certainly not in the evening hours. Certainly not that's willing to take you where you want to go.
No, don't worry, I won't bother with the meter.
Truth is, I don't mind driving out even in these evening hours to pick up a body in need.
Who else is gonna do it? And what else am I gonna do with my time? Sit in my trailer, watching my TV, poking the antenna with my cane to get the fuzzies out of the picture?
Anyways, I remember you. You think I'd forget something like that? I knew what you was to begin with the first time we met.
You must remember me too. You must be smart enough. Or have some kind of computer doohickey hooked up to your skull.
You're smart enough to come here, across the stars, maybe across the galaxy. Smart enough to put on a disguise and look like one of us.
Though it didn't fool me. I knew what you was. I knew what you was from where you were fixing to go.
Well, it was more than that too, weren’t it?
You weren't saying a word. Just like now, but I can hear you clear as day in my head.
Well, words ain't right. Thoughts, feelings, pictures, ideas. That's how I know you don't mean us no harm. That's how I know it's time for you to go.
Hell, I can’t blame you. I'm surprised you made it here twenty years. Sorry you had to see us like this.
Quite an ugly time we're living through.
I had hoped, when I seen you the first time, you'd come to help us out with our troubles. Teach us something or share some of those fancy technologies. But I know why you couldn’t do that.
We're too primitive. It’s like trying to teach a dog to use a computer. He’ll just lick the screen and shed on the keys and then it’s your problem too.
Even then, even though I knew what you was — well, it didn't even cross my mind to tell. What could I say?
A man, an unusual tall man, unusual pale, unusual thin, looking like he walked out of a costume party, calls and asks for a ride to the top of Hunger Mountain in the dead of night, and that this man that I dropped off in the cold, in the dark, at the end of a dirt road under a black starry sky, who was liable to die of exposure — he was not no normal man.
That the only reason I did it was because I believed him to be an extraterrestrial, an alien from another planet?
Hey, well I can feel you laughing yourself. Funny, ain’t it?
This feels like a campfire tale told by someone who’s seen too much and stayed kind anyway. Quiet, eerie, and full of grace. Sci-fi with a human bite. (or maybe alien). Great work on the clock.
Really lovely and sad.