When the pickups got real

 Growing up, my folks liked to watch a lot of documentaries about UFOs. It was of interest, I think, more to my father than my mother although she enjoyed the shows as well. As a child, I took it for granted I think... when my father would play "psychic cards" with my older brother and I, how he taught us to use the pendulum, or would talk for hours about things he had seen, done, and how the paranormal world worked. This was the norm for me.

The documentaries of then aren't really that different from now - except talk of what happened to people who made contact of the third kind (abductions) was rare. It was equally rare to talk about the horrors many people faced, from stolen babies to rape to painful experiments. Hell, it's almost as rare still today what with all of that drowned out by people preaching love and light from the same entities that do these frightening things.

So I'm a child of 11, or 12.. maybe younger... and it was my fervent hope to be picked up by one of these saucers. I didn't want to be on Earth - never felt like I fit in really and was bullied at school - and I saw the aliens as a means of escape. For a while I'd step out into my backyard and think as hard as I could, Here I am! Please come get me! And of course no one came.

It was hot weather - summertime I believe - when my mother stopped hanging clothes to look at the sky. I had been playing by the back porch and my older brother was hanging somewhere about. "Look!" my mother said to us, "There's a UFO!"

So we, all three, stopped and stared in the sky for a while. I didn't see it at first and when I did think I see it, it was nothing more than a grey dot in the distance that didn't seem to move. I was actually disappointed that it didn't come closer or wasn't, at least, close enough for me to see better detail.

After a while, my mother got bored and went back inside. My older brother had gotten bored and wandered off a long time ago. It was only me standing there, staring at the sky, hoping. After a while I gave up, too. I can't remember if I saw the UFO wink out of sight or not.

The incident was forgotten over the next year or so. We were a poor family - what with the new fishing laws squeezing the already-thin wallets of generation shrimpers like my father - and real life seemed so much more important. Our living conditions were changing - we had gone from living in a converted church bus my father had bought when our trailer was repossessed to a one bedroom trailer with the church bus stowed in the far back of our acre yard. My little brother was getting too old to sleep with my parents, so Dad converted the church bus again into a two bedroom suite for me and my older brother. My little brother was given a space in the trailer with the parents.

I hated sleeping in that bus. I was caught between feelings of being abandoned by my parents, jealousy that my little brother got to be in the house, and insecurity over being so far away from Mom and Dad at night. I was already given to having night terrors. The situation didn't help me any more.

But on a side note, my parents were doing the best they could. As I said before, we were very poor. We were probably lucky to get food on occasion, and I can remember my parents going hungry just so me and my brothers could have something to eat. They meant well by building that bedroom bus for my brother and me. They were providing as best they could.

It’s just that as a terrified child, I couldn’t understand all of that.

At first, right before being exiled to the back yard, things weren't as bad. I was always given to waking up screaming in the night, so much that my parents had stopped coming to my aide years ago when I was about five or so. I thought nothing of the reoccurring dreams I had of my dolls coming to life, always to come and hurt me. I would never have confessed, of course, that I was terrified of my Raggedy Anne doll. To be honest, I thought I had gotten the idea from a book I had read. The doll in that story would come to life, too. And, I thought, this only happened in dreams.

I hated to be alone, too. I always felt like I was being watched - unless I was in the woods. There I would find peace. But around the house I was jittery and always looking over my shoulder, especially when no one else was home. But I couldn't tell anyone how I felt. My parents had no patience for my insecurities, and I didn't have much in the way of friends.

My time in that back yard went from bad to worse in just a matter of weeks, it seems now that I think back on it.

Moon over Star

I took a moment to try to find out some information on alters that had their eyes sewn shut or were missing in some way. I remember faintly my husband mentioning finding something about it before, but now that I want to find it I can't. As happens when I try to dig into this sort of information I am suddenly very sleepy. Oh, well.

I am hesitant to read too much anyway, for fear I'll stumble across something I haven't talked about here yet. I know that sounds silly. But, for example, I keep coming across references to mirrors and implants. When I was younger mirrors figured a large part with me. My brother and I tried to open a mirror to see if we could escape this earth that way - and it opened alright, but not in the way we intended. And that's a story for another post.

And the implants: I always played with the lump behind my right ear. I'd always known something was there. I'm grown and I hear that's a popular spot for an implant - and a lot has happened with that. Which I'll have to try to remember to discuss later.

But for now before the time of the open mirror back when I still fudged with the lump behind my right ear because it was a lump - just a lump to me - and I was a kid. And kids picked - this is where I am in my time line. And my next attempt to get away from the world was to turn myself into a werewolf.

Mind you I was already half-convinced that I was. I had dreams of turning into a small black wolf a lot. I'd go out the front door of the house at night when everyone was asleep as if by commend, shift, and go running with the neighborhood dogs. There were times I'd go to the door because I'd been summoned and there waiting for me were the Dire Wolves (so my father called them when I told him about it. He said so proudly.). They were large as a big man and I was the run they ran behind, waiting for me to lead the way. I took it for granted I was their "leader" and man, I craved the times we ran together.

But then one night happened when I was running with the dogs and the alpha male of the neighborhood challenged me. We got into a fight - and I can't remember what happened after that. I woke up the next morning with scratches on my face. Three long ones going up my forehead. And I never shifted again. Into a wolf that is.

The last time I can think of offhand that I shifted started out like all the other nights, but it happened a couple of years after the dog fight. I stepped out of my bedroom and went to the mirror on the wall by the front door, which I always did in this particular "dream". I looked in the mirror and my eyes weren't human anymore. They were bird-like: golden and slitted. I said "no!" and ran out the front door and fell on the grass of our front yard. My mind was filled with an image of what I was going to become: a bird like creature, colored like fire. A phoenix.

And I craved it to happen to me now. I wanted it. I needed it.

I'm getting old and it still hasn't happened. LOL

So I'd went on a research trip for a school paper, and the subject I'd chosen was werewolves. Which, if you know your research lead me to vampires. And the information was thick - and hard to find. Back then in the 1980's there was a problem in my home town with a large "Satanist" group that liked to steal any material from the library that might be construed as metaphysical. But I got lucky. I found an old book from the 1940's or 50's in a hidden nitch of the library and it was entitled, simply, "Werewolves." It was perfect.

In it was a lot of good information. And one bit I latched onto was an old spell on how to turn yourself into a werewolf. Essentially you took a bit of werewolf hair, tied it to a bush, and said a chant. So long as this charm stayed in place you'd turned into a wolf under certain conditions.

So I took my dog's fur (being as he was part wolf) and did the spell. I went to sleep that night fully expecting to be a wolf the next day. Sure, going in heat worried me (was 14 at the time) but I was determined to get out of the human world somehow.

I half-awoke to find myself in a large round room. My eyes stayed shut but I knew I was surrounded by at least 12 men and one woman. The woman stayed by my right ear and spoke to the men as if she was defending me. And the men were debating on what to do about this: my desire to get the fuck out. And this spell I had cast. It apparently was a real problem for them and they had to determine if I would be allowed my wish or not.

I woke up the next day quite human so I'm pretty sure I didn't get my wish.

I stopped trying to escape so much after that. Something in me just gave up.