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“Spaceship” by James Tate 🇺🇸 (8 Dec 19438 Jul 2015)
I saw something in the sky, then realized it was only something in my eye. I rubbed it and then it felt better. But then there was a spaceship and I rubbed my eye again. It was still there. It was moving across the sky at an alarming speed. I didn’t know what to do. Then it was out of sight. I ran into the house and called the police. I told them what I had seen. I said, “What are you going to do about it?” They said they had already dispatched several squad cars to search the area. When they heard nothing back from those two cars they sent two more. They heard nothing from those two cars and an hour later they sent the last four cars they had. They waited nervously at the station. Hours passed. Finally they called for help from neighboring towns. Altogether they had sixteen cars from nearby towns. They sent out eight at first. Silence followed. This was really an emergency. They decided not to send out any more. Too dangerous. They called in the National Guard. They surrounded the area where they thought the spaceship had landed. It was a wooded area about ten miles from town. They moved in slowly, their heaviest weapons drawn. They heard squealing far off. As they approached, one of the guardsmen was thrown in the air, another sank into a hole. Then five were shot backward at great speed about a hundred yards. Now the remaining guardsmen looked at each other and decided to run for their vehicles. They jumped in and sped off. Then they stopped, not of their own accord, and a huge, monstrous hand came out of the forest and picked them up and hurled them back to where they came from, crashing them against a tree. They were all knocked out cold. Back at the police station they had not heard a word from anyone. They were terrified the end of the world had come. I called them several more times, but they were not answering the phone. The policemen from the first two squad cars showed up at work the next week. The officers on duty were dumbfounded. They said, “Thank God you’re alive. We can’t believe it. We thought sure you were dead.” “Oh no, we had the best time in our lives. We’ve never seen anything like that before,” one of them said. And so it went all week. The men in the second squad car came back and said the same thing. Then the men from the other towns, then the National Guard. All said it was the time of their lives. The officers at the station couldn’t figure it out, nobody could. They never knew their men liked being beaten up, hurled through space, crushed and eaten alive so much until now. Perhaps now they will get along better.