Fly Me to the Moon

You could have knocked me down with a feather, except that I was quite paralyzed under the alien's will, that High Fructose Corn Syrup, HFCS, the bane of modern food ingredients and soft drinks, found in nearly everything nowadays and the whipping child of organic intuitionalists everywhere, was in fact nearly the best possible ingredient for the distilling of its rocket fuel available!

We now had two choices available to us, cooperate or not. No surprise that 'not' was not really an option.

*************

It was a thankful advantage that we lived in a heavily agricultural county where a great many of the farmers, including the Rayburn's grew corn, and most of them sold their harvest to a local HFCS production plant. Given time and materials, if they'd had the knowledge, the brothers could have milled their own corn and created plain corn syrup... which would have worked tolerably as well, but the added enzyme processes created a more suitable product.

With silent commands, the brothers were ordered to stop their filling of the converter hopper and with a word, like the automatons they had become, drove off in the mostly still loaded truck to gather a different sort of plundered harvest. The local HFCS plant, like the regional Frito-Lay distributorship, had only minor security precautions in our largely crime free rural community, and I had no doubt that they'd return in a few hours, this time with a small tanker truck full of HFCS... unless they could find a miraculous way of diverting a filled rail car tanker here!

I'd like to say that it was a long frozen wait for the brothers to return, but in truth it seemed like just a few seconds had passed. The old UFO story about 'missing time' and all that. We had been somehow put on ice, frozen in time to wait. Now the stolen tanker truck had arrived and enough syrup had been pumped into the converter to make more than enough of the needed fuel for a safe and swift departure. The brothers were soon gone, to return the stolen truck with their minds erased clean of all memory of this encounter... not that anyone would have ever believed the truth from them!

As for Skip and Jane, and myself... our own fate was a bit more uncertain. The alien was of a 'servant race', and little able to exert its own free will against its orders in much of any meaningful way, but yet we all got the feeling of gratitude. We had helped it gather what it needed to escape from our planet and return to its mothership but there was little he could do in return for repayment of this perceived debt.

"Come?" The thought resounded into our heads, clearly as a question. The answer of 'where to?' didn't really figure into my thoughts, as I was lost in confusion as I regained control of my body and my free will.

"Please!" I heard Skip say, clearly and with great sincerity. I don't think he much cared where. It wasn't like he had any sort of life here since Rosco ruined his body.

"I'll go with you. I'll still need to care for you!" Jane weakly said, but without much if any enthusiasm. She didn't have much of a life here either, and her need to tend after her crippled brother fueled every drop of her blood. There was no place left for love or sentiment. Where he went, she would follow.

It was still even a greater surprise when my lips muttered of their own accord, "Me too!" I did have a lot to live for, or so I thought. I had a job I loved and enjoyed doing, friends, and a pair of not very bright but loveable cats. Other than those trivialities, there was no true love in my life and some deep part of me decided then and there that I didn't want to live in any world without Jane Wilson in it!

The choices made and done, we all fell lost into frozen time once more after I vaguely remember entering the craft of my own free will carrying Skip's helpless but willing body, and Jane by our side. Our world became one of darkness, confusion and shadow, but somehow we were not afraid.

**********

I remember only two things even remotely clearly about our time onboard the alien mother ship. First was that everything seemed slow, disjointed and dreamlike. Our minds all seemed linked into a common network that operated just slightly out of phase with our normal minds, more like vivid dreams than clear spoken thoughts, but still the thoughts came and went... and it was fairly noisy.

We were guests it seemed, but of a very nominal sort. The dark shadowy forms of other creatures came and went and we could feel thoughts of duty and obligation, but only a minimal sense of thanks. We were an unnecessary complication and a vague annoyance, a disruption from order and routine. Much like a neighbor might feel if they unwillingly agreed to watch over a nuisance of a pet for a few days. For a plugged nickel, I think at least half of the crew would have cheerfully pushed us out an airlock.

We were kept at first in separate dark enclosures, and time did not seem to pass in a smooth a linear fashion. Sometimes I felt like I was in a different dark place, numb and frozen, or feeling cold as if I were being examined by hands and instruments that I could not quite see or feel. Other times I felt the discomfort of others, especially Skip or Jane, as their senses of fear and mysterious intrusion flooded my thought channels. Others, men and women that I did not know, perhaps dozens of them, lent their own feeling of fear and confusion, as if their own passage here had been a sudden, mysterious and quite involuntary one, with no guarantee whatsoever of a happy conclusion to their trip.

I especially remember a flash of sudden emotion and pain from Skip, as if his entire body was being subjected to some extreme penetrating pain, as if he were being taken apart and put slowly back together, indifferently, and entirely without sedation. In our own fear, I felt my mind touch Jane's and for just a brief moment our thoughts were shared, our chief feeling now being regret. Sadness for the loss and waste of time in our lives -- alone and without each other.

We could not hold hands together, lost apart in our shadowy individual worlds, but gently our thoughts caressed and I think I heard her say "I'm sorry" faintly before our worlds became frozen in painless time once again.

*********

My second memory is sharper, but still as a more vivid dream. Jane and I were alone together, naked in a white softly padded room with an oval round window showing a sharp clear view of the moon, close enough to eyes that we felt that we could nearly touch it with our hands. Somehow, I felt that we were on-board the same ship, but in a nicer room than our dark cells. I had no feelings of the aliens' thoughts, as if were now in a secluded place, away from their neural network of thought.

Our thoughts were not entirely still alone. For these precious moments together Jane and I became as near one, together in thought and action. I knew deeply of her past pain, and of our common sense of loss. The words of anger notwithstanding, the love was still there, undiminished in her heart... as it was in mine.

Spoken words were unnecessary between us and our bodies fell together in love. If we had any thoughts that our acts of physical love between were being observed or recorded, we hadn't the slightest concern.

"We used to dance together, every Friday and Saturday nights at Lulu's Dancehall." I whispered, lost in yearning, in past dreams and already under the spell of that enormous moon, many times larger in our window than it had ever appeared to us on Earth."

"She misses us there, and still looks for us every weekend..." Jane sighed, as she walked slowly into my arms and held me increasing tightly, with her bare breasts now mashed tightly again mine. How I had so missed that tenderness!

"Then we shouldn't disappoint her any longer, but my favorite dance was always the last one, after she had closed, with just us together out in some grassy field, kissing and holding each other tight, slowly swaying, dancing to the music of just the moon and stars."

Under that bright big beautiful moon and with the surrounding stars brighter than they had ever appeared on earth, our hearts joined together as one as we held each close, swaying to the sounds of the music that our heartbeats made, and together for the first time in years we danced together, slowly and with caresses and yearning kisses we eventually fell to the floor to consummate our love in deeper, more intimate ways. Our regrets now lost to the past, we shared every intimate act of physical love together for what seemed as hours, but passed in my dream-like memories of perhaps only a few tens of minutes.

Only much later did it seem in my dream that we feel asleep in each other's arms, myself on top of Jane, still joined together in intimacy. Each of us now truly happy for the first time in many years.

***********

Jane and I awoke at the first crack of sunlight at dawn, back home in the soft grass near the woods of that now empty riverbed, naked but still holding hands with each other. Our clothes were in a pile next to us, but we were in no hurry to dress. Skip's body was next to ours but he appeared to be in a deeper sleep and we could not arouse him.

We both felt some sort of loss, as if we already missed the joining of our minds together, but even collecting our badly disjointed memories and shadowy fragmented dreams, we remembered little of anything of the events since we entered the woods and the riverbed. We just knew that something had happened... and soon we figured out that we had lost three days together that we could never more than vaguely recall just a few scattered moments of that lost time.

Our lost love had indeed been recalled, and Jane never felt again the crippling emotional pain that had imprisoned her for so many years. They were 'lost' years, we decided... and swore at our wedding at the courthouse the very next day that we'd make up for it with every single minute we had left together.

The miracle that we never quite could comprehend was how Skip regained the full use of his legs and regained the complete unrestricted use of his arms as well! We all decided privately that we had no reasonable explanation for this miracle and vague stories of being healed onboard a UFO would just make folks think we'd all gone crazy! Instead, Skip quietly drove out of town for a few weeks and we concocted a story that Skip had found a spinal specialist who could treat his injuries. In any case, no one blinked an eyelash at Skip's seemingly miraculous cure and he soon found himself hotly courting a pretty young gal who worked at our dispatch office.

No one had missed the reclusive Jane at all during those three lost missing days, but at work I had a little explaining to do. Fortunately, the seemingly sudden engagement and wedding with my old girlfriend provided a more than plausible excuse. I apologized to my laughing and greatly amused boss that my former ex had gone through a sudden change of heart about me, and she had handcuffed me to her bed and had her wicked way with me, repeatedly, during those missing days until I agree to marry her! No one doubted a word of this story, and my absence from work for that time was agreeably written off with a wink as 'mental health' sick-days. I have a great boss! He's already mentioning that when he retires and moves off to Arizona in another five years that he'll support me if I want the Sheriff's job. I think I will, the pay's pretty good and we'll need it to send our kids off to college!

No one reported any UFO sightings during our absence and the three of us were soon quite content to mostly forget the entire very strange incident.

The fading mystery of the Doritos Bandito remains on the books as unsolved, and for some strange unexplained reason I have absolutely no interest in investigating this increasingly old unsolved cold case any further. It would severely detract from the time I could spend eating pie at Dot's diner for lunch with my darling wife and our three children, or make me late home for work... for even more private and enjoyable delights!