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Jim Sullivan - "UFO"

I went through a lot of phases as a kid. The first was a dinosaur-phase in which I thought every single rock I found at the park was a fossil and brought lots of "fossils" home. After a while my mom made me bring all my precious scientific discoveries back to the park. I was a little upset because I knew that other kids would discover them and then they would be the ones in the newspaper with headlines like "Local boy discovers oldest fossils in the park by the swing. A lot of them!" but I listened to my mom.

After that it was my turtle-phase. I got a little turtle and shortly after my mom read a headline that said something like "Local boy got sick! Really, really sick from the germs of his pet turtle." So she said we should let him go back to his natural habitat. "He would be much happier with his turtle friends and fish friends," she said. I said "I think he seems happier alone. I think he likes being alone. He is an outsider artist turtle or maybe he is a goth turtle." I didn't actually say that but I wish I did. So the time came to let him go. I was sad but it was for the best. We went to the pond near by, which had a lot of turtles already. There were some other kids there fishing with their dads. I didn't want them to catch my turtle so I took a couple of steps back and threw my turtle as hard as I could like an AAA pitcher's last chance to get into the Major League, with his scouts watching, bases loaded at the bottom of the ninth inning, but I was a little kid who had bad pitching form even though I played lots of baseball like all Japanese boys. I threw him and he hit the water like a skipping stone. He skipped three times and disappeared. I hope he is ok.

Last was the UFO-phase, I think I was 11 or so. I was obsessed by UFOs and aliens. I wanted to believe. I slept by my window looking at the stars at night. My home was in a northern outskirt of Osaka, by the mountains, so some days I could see the stars pretty clearly. Once, I saw a shooting star and was convinced that I would be abducted by aliens and they would do surgery on my head to put in implants to monitor me from far away. I was scared so I tucked in my covers like a sleeping bag and held on to my headboard. But then I realized they could just abduct my bed too so I gave up on that. I also knew, from watching UFO documentaries, that they could erase the memory of the abduction itself. I figured maybe I was already abducted. I thought, I need to tell my parents, my brothers, and teacher, but wait, if I tell them, the implant in my brain might trigger an alarm on the UFO that is based behind the moon and they would strike earth with a really thick laser that would kill mankind immediately, all because of me. So, I didn't say anything, to save mankind. It was a mission, and I kept it secret until now. Now I think it is probably ok. It's been over 22 years so the implant's battery is most likely dead. The end.

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