The Dishes

Page 4 of 5

It wasn't too long before I came up to a little patch that had been logged a year or so before that, still a few stumps they weren't able to clear out but otherwise empty.  I walked out from the forest to almost the middle of the clearing and looked around, couldn't see anything.  I finally decided whatever that thing had been was either gone for good, or more likely just some branches that caught the light funny and when the car drove past I just looked at that spot a little differently and couldn't see it.  I turned around and took a couple of steps towards the road before I saw three of the stumps that I had passed coming into the clearing stand up.

One of them was surely my new friend, but all three of them looked exactly the same so I couldn't tell which one it was.  They all stood there, looking at me, with those same empty eyes reflecting the moon.  They were standing almost at attention, like a squad of soldiers getting inspected.  A bit more relaxed than that, but that's close enough for government work.  I don't know how long we stood there, staring at each other.  Maybe a minute, maybe an hour, probably closer to ten or fifteen minutes but I don't know.  Then they started walking.  

They walked with an eerie grace, like dancers almost, or cats or something.  Not quite synchronized, which killed the military image they almost had, but pretty close, and rhythmic, like they were each walking to a different drum that was part of the same song.  They walked towards me, and I couldn't do anything but watch them get closer and closer.  They stopped a couple of feet from me, close enough to where I had to look down to see them.  

I've heard a lot of stories about people getting abducted, or waking up and seeing these guys in the middle of the night, and they always talk about these things talking to them with their minds.  Telepathy, they call it I think.  I don't know about that, but these guys didn't say anything to me, either with their mouths or with their minds.  They just stood there, like they were waiting for me to introduce myself or something.  

I wanted to say something, wanted to do anything except just stand there like an idiot, but I couldn't.  Couldn't move, couldn't talk, nothing.  I think I must've bored them, or something, because before long they started walking again, and walked right past me.

I turned around and watched them walk for a few moments, and then they stopped in the middle of the clearing and turned back towards me.  Then they were gone.  No sounds, no bright light, no ship or anything that I could see.  They just disappeared from that clearing, like someone flipped a switch or something, no fade or nothing.  Just gone.

His silence stretched out until I realized that he was finished.  

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"What happened next?"

"I went home and did the dishes.  You ready for another one?"

I couldn't believe it.  "What do you mean you went home to do the dishes?  Why didn't you call someone, the cops or the army or something?"

"What did I have to show for it?  No one would've believed it.  Even if they did, what could they have done?"

"Something, anything.  At least someone could've been keeping an eye out or something."

"You just don't get it, do you kid?  We get so caught up in our little lives, our jobs, our hobbies, our petty he-said-she-said arguments.  We're arrogant, all of us, we all think we're the end-all-and-be-all of creation, but we're not.

"Even on this chunk of rock, do you think it's going to matter if you did the dishes or not?  Do you think standing your ground on that will keep Mt. St. Helens from erupting when it decides to blow again?  Do you think they're going to have a national holiday for you because you made Lisa do housework?  Our petty little arguments about taking the garbage out or cleaning up the cat box are so much less than insignificant in the bigger picture that it's almost funny to think about them.

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