by Anna Collins
I won’t say that I don’t feel human. If anything, I would say that I feel almost too human, that I feel everything too deeply and become hurt too easily. But this in itself is what makes me feel alien; what makes me feel like I don’t belong. My Grandpa felt the same way. He was an artist at heart despite the fact that he made his living as a welder. He could paint or draw anything he saw and reproduce it with a photo like an accuracy. My mother always said that this was the reason why he had lost himself in his delusions; that this was why his aliens and flying saucers seemed so real to him because he wanted them to be real so desperately that he basically willed them into reality.
Well, at least, his reality.
For years, we all thought that Grandpa was completely out of his mind. Sure, we all want to think that there’s life on other planets and there are more advanced forms of life other than ourselves out there. But you have to admit, most of us believe aliens are nothing more than the creations of science fiction writers imaginations and that we’re completely alone in the universe. To be honest, I always hoped this wasn’t true. When I looked up at the night sky, I couldn’t help but think it was a huge waste of space if there wasn’t someone or something other than us out in there in all that blackness.
But the way Grandpa made it sound, the aliens he encountered were all nothing but horrors. Creatures that snatched us up in the middle of the night, fly you into space and then essentially do nothing but torture you until they grow bored and send you back to your bed to relive those horrors until you lost your mind. It all seemed so terrible, too terrible to be real, so I convinced myself that it wasn’t.
But just a couple of minute ago, I discovered that Grandpa’s visions were all very real. That is such a thing as a little green men and that we are not alone in the universe.
And that these little green men maybe even more terrible than I can possibly imagine.
May God help me and protect me.
Do you remember that movie that came out in the 90’s about the four guys in Arizona who were kidnaped by aliens? Yeah, I know, it’s kind of a vague question because there were a lot of movies and TV shows about alien abduction in the 90’s. But chances are you’ll remember this one because a really famous director who went on to win a ton of Oscar’s for directing a couple of World War II dramas was the one who made it. But, obviously, the alien abduction flick wasn’t one of his better-known efforts.
Anyway, the reason why I’m bringing this particular movie up is because one of the guys who was kidnaped and portrayed by some faceless actor that nobody remembers now. Well, that guy in real life was my Grandfather. In the movie, he basically denies the abduction ever happened, but with a menacing wink-wink to go along with it. Meaning that he knows it happened, but he doesn’t want to remember it. He just wants to put it all behind him and move on with his life. And really, who could blame, right?
But, of course, that’s the movies, it’s nothing but make believe. However, in real life, my Grandpa never shut about the abduction. Seriously, it’s all he ever talked about, and because of his obsession with it, he lost his business, his wife and kids, and his home. Yeah, he was a serious mess.
I remember the last time I saw him up at his cabin, I was 15-years-old, and my mom forced me and my sister to go and visit him in his creepy little cabin deep in the woods just outside of Flagstaff. Me, my dad, and my baby sister all grumbled about it for weeks leading up to the visit. It wasn’t that we didn’t love my Grandpa, but the alien stuff really creeped us out. Well, it creeped me out. My dad thought it was all nothing more than a bad acid trip—According to my dad, at the time of the abduction my Grandpa was really into hallucinogens in a heavy way—and nothing more. With my sister, well, she just hated going to Grandpa’s cabin because he didn’t have electricity or television or any of the things she prized so much. Personally, I didn’t mind getting away from it all for a couple of days and just being out in the middle of nature with nothing but your thoughts.
Of course, we all went because Grandpa was, for better or worse, my mother’s dad, and the fact is she would make our lives a living hell if we didn’t make the trip with her. My mom is tiny little woman—she’s only 5’1 and maybe weighs 100 pounds soaking wet—but if you get on her bad side, she’s deadlier than a rabid grizzly bear. So we made the hour-and-a-half-long drive from our house in Phoenix up into the snow covered winter mountains of Flagstaff (This was another reason why it wasn’t too much of a chore for me to visit my uncle Dale. Growing up in Phoenix, we basically have two kinds of weather, really hot and kind of hot. It’s great if you’re a nut for the sun, but not so great if you’re a rainy day girl like me.).
When we first arrived, Grandpa was in a really great mood. He was all smiles and hugs and asked all of us how we were doing and about what we’d been up to. He seemed like a completely normal, mentally healthy human being who just happy to see his family. This, of course, only lasted for about 8 hours. Okay, maybe a little longer than that, it at least lasted until mom and dad were asleep and Grandpa had me alone.
I’ve always been a night owl. Even when I was a little kid, I could never fall asleep before midnight. It drove my folks up the wall, but it was who I was. Grandpa was the same. In fact, I don’t think Grandpa ever really slept except for a few hours a night because his body forced him to shut down. Anyway, as usual when we stayed with Grandpa, I had to sleep in the living room because his tiny spare bedroom only really accommodated a couple of people, and my sister was small enough at the time that my folks would just have her sleep in her little Hello Kitty sleeping bag at the foot of the bed. The sleeping arrangements were fine with because of my own weird sleeping habits.
I was sitting on the living room couch reading by lamplight when Dale came and sat with me.
“So how’ve you been doing, Mandy?” He asked with a nervous tick that made his eyelids flutter like they were butterflies. I knew the look he was giving me, and I knew what was coming. I dog-eared my book and put it on the ground.
“I’ve been doing really good. How about you?”
“Good, good. Hey, do you mind if I show you something?”
“Sure,” I said, my eyes rolling internally. I knew what he want to show me, it was all just part of visiting Grandpa.
“Come on, it’s in my room.”
I followed him down the creaking cedar plank hall and waited patiently as he opened the three heavy locks he used to keep whoever or whatever out of it. He finally finished with his sequence and we scampered inside, slamming the door shut behind us. The last time I had been in Grandpa’s room a couple of years ago, the room had been a complete mess. The walls were covered from floor-to-ceiling with newspaper clippings of other UFO abductions and news stories about technological advances. You see, Grandpa was the type of person who thought things like computers, video games, cell phones (I imagine he would’ve freaked out if he ever got the chance to see a smartphone.) DVD players, etc., was all alien technology given to our corporations in exchange for God knows what? He just couldn’t believe human being were even remotely smart enough to create them on their own without smoking of help.
But this time, his room was completely clear of any clutter. The walls were completely bare except for a few landscape paintings Grandpa had made while he was in high school (Grandpa was an incredibly talented artist. I still have a charcoal sketch he made of me when I was 8-years-old hanging up in my office. It’s such a perfect likeness you would think it was photograph). And there weren’t any piles of books or magazines littering the floor, either. The normally overcrowded room was so tidy and well organized that I couldn’t help but think that maybe he had turned a new leaf? That maybe he finally realized his obsession was nothing more than a complex hallucination? In fact, the only thing that occupied his room was his easel with a massive covered canvass sitting in it.
“You’ve been painting again!” I nearly shouted. “That’s so cool, Grandpa!”
“Yeah, let me show it to you.”
On the right-hand side of the canvas, Grandpa had painted one of his “Gray Men”. You know what those are, right? I guarantee you if you ever saw a TV show about alien abduction you’ve seen a “Gray Man”. They have the enormous heads with the huge black eyes and the long sexless bodies. Well, that’s what Grandpa had painted, but the skin of the thing looked almost metallic. On the left-hand side, he’d painted something I’d never seen before. The figure looked like a man, but its skin was a light blue with almost iridescent yellow hair. The blue man’s body almost looked like how Michelangelo had depicted Adam in the Sistine Chapel. The painting was brilliant. Weird, but brilliant.
“What is this?” I asked.
“It’s the gray men.”
“Okay, I can see that. But who’s the blue man?”
“That’s the gray men! That’s the gray men outside of their armor!”
“What? Yeah, you see, this thing here,” He said motioning to the traditional rendering of the grey man. “That’s just armor. It’s like a spacesuit that our astronauts wear. The blue guy, he’s what’s inside the suit.”
I shook my head, dumbfounded. Grandpa wasn’t getting any better, his delusions had just jumped to a whole other level of crazy, and I was going to go ahead and play along with it.
“How do you know this is what they look like?” I asked, kicking myself a little the minute the words came out of my mouth.
“Because they showed me. The last time they were here! It absolutely blew my mind, kiddo! I mean, for years I thought they were trying to hurt us or clone or something. But the night they came and he stepped out of his armor and put his arm across my shoulder, I just knew they weren’t here to harm us. They’re here to help us.”
“But help us with what?”
“I don’t know?”
It wouldn’t be until five years later that I would find out first hand what they were here to help us with.
By the time I graduated from high school and moved away to New Mexico to go to college, we found out that Grandpa had been diagnosed with lung cancer. The man never smoked a day in his life and ate an entirely vegetarian diet, and he comes down with stage 2 lung cancer. Because of his distance from any major hospitals, my mom moved him into my old room and made it her job to make sure he recovered from cancer. And for a while there, it really seemed like he was going to beat it. Of course, the doctors had to remove one of his lungs and he seemed to be responding well to chemo and radiation treatments. But in the end, like so many cancer patients, it wasn’t the disease that got him, but pneumonia.
His death was sudden and devastating to our small family. As expected, my mom took it the worst, I didn’t think she would ever stop crying. My mom had lost her mom when she was 13, so Grandpa had raised her alone. So it wasn’t that she had just lost a father, she had lost the last living strand to her family other than me and my sister. But what was even weirder was how Grandpa’s death affected my dad. Grandpa was my dad’s mentor when he was first learning to become a welder and they had been best of friends—it was how he’d met my mother—but they drifted apart after my dad joined the Army, and the two of them just never seemed to be able to reconnect. Of course, the alien stuff didn’t help either. But since Grandpa had come to live with my folks, he and my dad finally re-bonded and they became the type of friend’s they used to be. So I won’t say he was as much of a mess as my mom, but he was hurting more than I had ever seen him hurt.
Because of all of the heartache going on around our house, I decided to take on the funeral arrangements. Grandpa had drawn up a will when he found he was sick, and he stipulated that he wanted to be cremated and that he wanted us to spread his ashes near his beloved cabin in Flagstaff. He also stipulated that the cabin and all his possessions should go to me upon his death. I was stunned when I read this because I figured he’d want to leave it to mom and dad to help cover his medical expenses.
“No, kiddo,” My dad said to me on our back porch while he smoked one of his rare cigarettes. “Your Grandpa was actually pretty well off from when your grandma died. He gave us the rest of the money before he died. He wanted you to have the cabin.”
So that was that. We cremated Grandpa and then I went back to college, graduated, got married, and then two years later, got divorced.
No, I never thought I would be the type of woman who would be divorced by the time she was 25. In fact, the way I had my life mapped out I would meet the man I was going to marry at 20, graduate from college at 22, then get married, then enter my masters program at 23, complete that by 26 and start hunting for teaching jobs while I shopped my first novel. I would, inevitably, find a tenure-track professorship (Desirably somewhere out east.), have my novel pick up by one of the big 6 publishers with a meaty 3 book deal to go along with it, and then and only then would I start thinking about starting a family.
But the monkey wrench in this whole process was the man I chose to become my future husband. His name was Scott. He was 225 pounds of ginger haired muscle who loved rugby, Hemingway, and mixed martial arts. I should have known the minute he told me about how much he loved The Sun Also Rises and For Whom The Bells Toll that I should have run for the hills. But, Scott, well, he also possessed certain other … attributes that made him very desirable as a husband. To be blunt, Scott’s penis and the things he could do me with it left me in a bit of a fog that didn’t lift until a year after our wedding and nearly a year into my master’s program. This is when I found out that I wasn’t the only one who had been charmed by Scott’s trouser snake, and his extramarital shenanigans ended our marriage and turned me into an emotional wreck.
All of my carefully laid plans, nothing but dust, and I returned home to Phoenix to cry on my mother’s shoulders and perhaps write my way through my pain, and maybe get myself back on track in a year or two. The whole problem with living with my mom and dad after so many years of independence was that I was living with mom and dad after so many years of independence. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mom and dad more than anything, but god are they annoying. So obviously the whole cry on mom’s shoulder thing only lasted about 2 weeks, but then I was ready to crawl out of my skin. Thankfully, the solitude I so desired was only a short hour-and-a-half drive from my parents house to Uncle Dale’s cabin.
No, not Grandpa’s cabin, my cabin.
“Oh, Mandy, why would you want to go up there?” My mother asked in her Eee www that’s gross voice. “It’s been years since anyone’s even been up there. For all you know it's full of bats or raccoons, or both bats and raccoons.”
“I just need to get away for a while, Mom,” I didn’t have the hear to say that I needed to get away from her. “Besides, the quiet is exactly what I need right now. And maybe if the cabin needs a little fixing up, it’ll help me take my mind off everything else.”
All she did was shake her head in that disapproving way that makes me want to gouge her eyes. But it’s also the same shake that basically lets you know that she’s washed her hands of the whole situation.
More or less, I had her approval to go up to the mountains and go as bug shit crazy as her dad did.
No, the cabin wasn’t infested with either bats or raccoons because before he left for the final time, Grandpa had shut the place up nice and tight, so there was absolutely no way any vermin were going to make their way inside. But, it had been over 5 years since anyone had stepped foot inside of the place, so the minute I walked inside, I was practically choked by the 1-inch coat of dust that was kicked up by my sneakers. I’d come prepared for a little bit of cleaning, but not for this kind of major clean up. But that seemed to be the story of my life as of late, underprepared for life’s challenges and unwilling to accept what was right in front of me. The fact was I was a control freak, I needed everything to fit in a neat little box of my design, and if it didn’t, I turned a blind eye to it and refused to see the truth until it had me pinned to
the ground and it was punching me in the face.
I locked the front door of the cabin and made the 20 minute drive into Flagstaff to stock up on what I would actually need to get the place clean, I cursed under my breath the entire ride there and on the way back.
***
I spent my first and last day at the cabin scrubbing it clean from one corner to the next. By the time I was done, I was covered in a layer of grime that I looked like some kind of weird mud person from a B-horror movie. Thankfully the well pump was still in working order and I was able to wash off the grime. Unfortunately, it was a cold shower because the propane tank was bone dry, so therefore no hot water and no heat. Luckily, I’d brought huge stack of thick comforters from home to repeal the cold until I arranged for a service to come out and fill the propane tank.
