Woody Allen Makes A Scary Sandwich - Horror Pastiche, Stories & Poems, Page 2

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  I arose, looking wildly about everywhere at everything, but there was an obvious view port straight ahead of me. And people! It dawned like a starburst that I was onboard an alien spacecraft, clearly orbiting the planet Earth, or so it seemed. Wow, whose side was I on, now? Everything was dark inside, but there were small track lights everywhere, lending a soft, velvety ambience to the environment. The spaceship itself was clearly gargantuan, resembling an overdeveloped version of the Queen Mary, or a similar luxury cruise liner.

  It was nearly identical to what we had on Earth before…I could sense a presence behind me. I felt a hand clutching my shoulder. I wheeled, expecting only the worst. For I could see clearly, in spite of the eye-protecting light. Now my time had surely come!

  “What are you doing here?” inquired one of the crew, and somehow I just knew it was the ship’s main navigator. Stammering with all the excitement I could muster, I almost screamed aloud every minor detail of how my time machine worked. But then I shut up, realizing they must already know all about it.

  “Surely, you’ve studied what Gibbs and I accomplished!” I cried, as the gentleman nodded in an offhand manner, looking more bored than anxious.

  “Look, I’ll make a deal with you,” the ship’s main navigator said in complete English, speaking a tongue perfectly appropriate to my own century and locale, right down to its regional Arkansas accent. “If you help us fight the Draconian Empire for one prescient year, we will take you home.”

  “HOME?” I screeched into his smiling face. “Home?” I said, suddenly realizing the repercussions of my actions. However, I had no real family, back there, always being alienate in my own time, stuck perpetually in another’s place.

  “But I just got here! I have so much to learn from you, if I’m not so retarded that I can’t understand anything, next to you people!” I had immediately begun ingratiating myself, apparently. The main navigator chuckled, clearly amused, and then became serious. He seemed almost to know what my next question would be.

  “Please, can I stay here onboard your ship, and live here with you? I’ll be no trouble, honest!” I stopped short of begging, but had already done so, and held up my hands in prayer to the main navigator.

  He suddenly “tsked,” as though what I’d said had been highly inappropriate, anyway. As if what I had blurrily stated held some deeper contextual meaning, like what was supposed to be an ad on a cereal box had already memorized my credit card number. Back and forth, I had slid into a totally fluxing place, one with a constantly realigning, strange new divisional meaning.

  He nodded, indicating an answer to my many questions and long-withheld desires to lead a happier life. “Okay, our traveler from both the past and the future. If you vow to Yahway you will stay with us for one single year, we will give you the most appropriate, wonderful, and splendidly possible of all permanent wives.”

  This sounded quite peculiar, yet so fetching! Unsure, and promised a way out of perpetual loneliness, it was all I could do to not nod, but my head moved joyfully and expectantly by itself into a firm, and patently normal, yes!