The apartment was spacious, with sixteen foot high ceilings, a sizeable living
area, three bedrooms, a full service kitchen with a walk-in pantry and one bathroom
containing a deluxe porcelain tub without a shower. A three foot long hose with a
spray nozzle was adapted in place for a shower. You could say that the apartment
was vintage, perhaps built half a century or more ago.
Michael was a hermit and never left his apartment. It wasn't a phobia so much as he
was always content to remain indoors. He would leave only to replenish his pantry
or get new things, whatever they may be.
He would watch a lot of movies on his DVD player or he would use the internet to
make sure he never fell out of contact with the people in his life. He hadn't done
any work for years, content on lazing about his hard earned apartment.
He use to write fiction under a pseudonym name and the occasional film plot
under his real name. Years of writing eventually paid off and he made enough money
to set him well for life. That's when he called it quits.
There was a demand for his talent for a few years following his grand exit
from the entertainment business. He gracefully declined all the offers, quoting
himself as overworked for so long that his motivation and imagination had become like
a dry well. Of course he was lying, but if business people knew he was as good as he
ever was creatively they would never quit asking.
Michael would get the occasional visit from some of his friends that he once worked
with. They would always ask him when he would go back to work and he would always
tell them, "I don't know, maybe never."
He wasn't much of a teaser or one to play "hard-to-get" and everyone knew that
so they respected his wishes without pushing the issue or probing him like he
had a secret project in the works. He was a face-value sort of writer and never made
anything out to seem like more than it really was. He was also a firm believer
in "what-comes-around-goes-around" and that served him well because nobody ever read
into anything he said or did with anything more than what was really there.
He loved jigsaw puzzles, owning far more of them than he could solve in his whole
lifetime. He would order new ones on internet auction sites for extra cheap although
he already had a pile of unsolved jigsaw puzzles in the back of one of his
extra bedrooms, waiting for his next puzzle-solving excursion.
He had a large desk on wheels that he would roll out into his living room where
he would glue the puzzle together on a tag-board while he watched movies. Each puzzle
was different time-wise to solve. Some would go on for a week or two, some would
go on for only a few days. He would hang the puzzles up on his walls when they were
finished.
There wasn't any central theme to the jigsaw puzzles he purchased or chose to solve.
It only mattered if he liked the picture or not. So there was a variety of
puzzle-pictures hanging on his walls. Anything from cars to country or city scenes
to classic movie actors or actresses. He had over twenty of them hanging up.
Although he was a writer in trade, he only owned a few books. He hadn't liked to read
much like many writers he had known throughout his life. It wasn't much of a deal
anyways as he always found a way to fill his time and continue to make sure his brain
functioned.
Michael was never one to intrude or impose himself on others. He had no desire
to debate or argue or push any agendas. He would quietly during his writing career
make his way ahead of others without any hassles as he never risked getting
on anyone's raw side.
He also had a knack for avoiding conflict in both his personal life and his
professional life. He would go the other way whenever someone would try and bait him
into a squabble or goad him into a meaningless test of wits. Being of sound mind
and exceptional reasoning skills, he saw such behavior as nothing more than
an emotional and mental drain and he wasn't one to enjoy self-deprecation.
It was often very dark in his apartment because he would leave the curtains closed
and the lights dim. He would go so long without going outside that once he actually
did go outside his eyes would need half an hour to overcome the sunlight.
He would contemplate how tough life was before he began his writing career, before he
realized his talents. He would consider what life had become and give himself kudos
for how far he had pushed himself and for what he succeeded in doing with his life.
True, he had it much harder than a lot of folks who succeeded in entertainment,
but that was all finished now. His contentedness in lazing about was well deserved.
He likened his current temperament as being a doughy chunk of volcanic ejecti tossed
into a freezing waterhole. He was fried and his indoor vacation hadn't appeared
so awkward with all things considered.
He never had writer's block. He hadn't thought of his break as the creative clog
he let on with the people in the business, he saw it as an overdue break
from the scathing pressures of the business itself. He knew he could continue to bang
out best sellers and golden plotlines but he knew that the pressures of life
in the spotlight were getting the good of him and wearing him out. He quit while he
was ahead and that was greater than fizzling out and losing his mind.
"It could make you go nuts." He would tell people when he worked. Nobody
ever challenged that thought-line. Maybe because half of them really were already
nuts while the other half were on their way there. It seemed that way.
He was always practical in what he wrote about. Love, adventure, thrillers, action,
westerns, comedies, there was always a sense of reality in whatever he wrote
and he was very good at it too.
One day though, while idling away in his apartment, he happened upon a new subject
that eluded him his whole life; UFOs. Now, he had heard about the movies about alien
invasions or conspiracy cover-ups, but he always avoided them because he was a
non-believer. But his ex-wife Elaine sent him an email one early morning of a video
she recorded with her camera phone.
She was waiting at an intersection during rush hour when a silver disk the size
of a semi-truck descended silently and slowly then put on an intricate light show
along the outer rim. She began to record it while it was descending and Michael
could hear his seven year old son Dexter say, "Mom! What is that?! That's gotta
be aliens!"
For a good two minutes it hung in the sky motionless while it's lights made a random
dance along the outer rim. Suddenly it divided into two separate ships. A bright flash
drowned everything in a light so bright that the screen went momentarily blank. Both
of the space ships then shot off into the distance away from the camera and high
up into the atmosphere. Elaine zoomed in as the space ships disappeared then the video
promptly ended.
Michael never thought the recording was false or fake because his ex-wife and son
had never played any tricks on him before. He dutifully submitted it to a UFO agency
who declared it authentic as there were several other camera phone recordings
from other people who were there.
This UFO video sent Michael into an obsessive internet search for information
about space aliens. The more he searched the more his obsession deepened. He would
eventually push aside all of his activities while he searched the internet
for all that he could find on the subject.
He loaded his hard-drive with pictures, videos, news articles, official records,
personal accounts and whatever else on UFOs and aliens that he could find. He went on
the message boards to converse with others and he made an extensively detailed
"internet map" of all the sites he ever encountered on the subject.
He became an engorged conspiracy nut and began to acquire a paranoidal overtone in his
personality. He shut out his friends, never answering his door. He quit maintaining
his relationship with his ex-wife and his son. He had his windows boarded up
and had a plethora of new locks added to his already secure apartment door.
He would periodically scan his entire apartment for bugs, as he was convinced that
he was being watched. Every little thing that went wrong or wasn't perfect made
him reel into a degenerative obsession over whatever it was.
He couldn't function in public anymore. He hired a delivery man to retrieve groceries
or whatever other items he needed to survive in his apartment. The days became months,
the months became years. Eventually everyone quit trying to contact him anymore
as they all thought he was beyond all repair. They didn't know why he shut himself
away so thoroughly, they assumed it was from his bad experiences in the entertainment
business. They didn't know he became a neurotic conspiracy nut but that was precisely
what he had become.
A whole six years went down the drain while he hid away inside his sealed apartment.
At that point he had become like a folk hero over the internet with all his believable
theories on alien life and conspiracies about aliens. Although he was a figurehead
anonymously on the internet, in life he became a forgotten success, toiling away
in a delusional trip of perpetual paranoia that was more fitting of someone who was
less intelligent. Nobody he knew would ever know how nuts he would become though,
and that was a shame.
One day there was a knock on the door. Michael was surprised because nobody
had knocked on his door for a good four years. He even made his delivery man call him,
no knock. He didn't know what to do, he had become so unable to handle social
exchanges. His ability to handle other people had degraded so much that he had an
internal conniption fit when he heard the knock.
"Who's there?" He answered loudly, damning himself for removing the peephole
on his door and filling the hole with gel-cement. There was no return voice, only
another knock. He waited thirty seconds then said, "Okay, I'm gonna unlock the door!
Wait one second."
It took him another thirty seconds to unlock the many locks on his door. He slowly,
with hesitation, cracked the door enough to see. What he saw made him instantly numb
over from head to toe. His blood froze inside a second. A tall grey alien was standing
in his apartment hallway in tailored clothing that appeared made of felt or wool.
Michael tried closing the door as quickly as he could but the alien put his
arm in the way, forcing himself through the doorway. He grabbed Michael up with
the shoulder area of his shirt and lifted him off the ground like he was as light
as a feather. In the alien's left hand he had a small electronic device that he
pressed into Michael's temple. Michael passed out.
MORE SHORTS IN MY BLOG
http://www.online-literature.com/for...p?14918-Shorts
Every Shout In A Tornado
http://www.online-literature.com/for...t-In-A-Tornado
Suzie's Sizzlin' Summer
http://www.online-literature.com/for...Sizzlin-Summer
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