by Arthur Bob Mullen 3

The road comes winding down the long hill towards the final curve. As a boy I remember lying in my bed with the covers keeping me warm, my youthful eyes following the headlights and shadows of passing cars that played upon the ceiling of my room. The window faced the street, and by three years old I could tell precisely when that combination of sliding transformed shadows and shining lights meant a visitor had turned into the driveway.

First the light would form a wave that swept across the ceiling in the shape of my window. The wave would disappear with a diagonal swipe back into the top of my window and the shadows of my blinds would elongate and then I would sit up in bed to see who it was in the driveway. Oh, it's just some guy turning around. A lost man turning his car back to face Dart Hill, because going down wasn't his style.

Three years old was the time when I had developed this style of monitoring traffic. After that year, everything changed. I was still youthful, but not longer was I innocent and unafraid. My parents, not yet divorced but approaching that sharp final curve, went for a night out on the town. They dropped me off at my auntys house. Aunty lived with another woman named Mo, no relation to me. Both were teachers, but the single syllable and Mo's curly hair made her particularly fascinating to me at that time of my life.

That night, Aunty read thirty or so childrens books to my sister and me and then went upstairs to sleep. She was in bed by five o'clock. I stayed up, being a little older than three and fully energized by my imagination. As luck had it, Mo was downstairs with her dog Shilo, both of them feasting on a Star Trek rerun. I was hungry; too hungry to pass up mouth-watering space oddyssey coupled with Mo's curiously curled hair. Besides, the large writing in the childrens books hadn't tired out my eyes like Auntys because I couldn't read. My imagination fiended for bigger more colorful pictures and the men in space suits on the screen had plenty of those.

I curled up on the couch between my Aunt Mo and her fat, constantly-thirsting-cheese labrador, Shilo. Shilo had eaten a cheese and peanut butter sandwich for dinner. Fascinating to watch the animal's jaws smack and chew. Big guy Shi. I ran my hands over the animals coarse fur, feelings it's obesity. The effect of a lifetimes PB cheeses. My Aunt Mo told me not to pinch the animal but I was only squeezing him a little.

The episode was the one where the black tar alien sucks up various crewmen. We sat, threes asses to the cushions, captivated. Shilo was breathing heavily. My imagination, overfed, took the Trek as if it were reality on television. It was like I was watching the black tar alien suck Spock up on the evening news, so real it seemed. Spock was dying a horrible death. His leg got sucked in first. By the time he was up to his waist in black tar Spock realized the end was near and began to deliver his farewell address to Kirk. I was horrified. My friend with the elf-ears was dying and there was nothing that I or my fake aunt Mo, with her queer curlings and all, could do about it.

Terrified, shaking, I hugged onto Shilo for my dear young life. One arm wrapped partially around the beasts stomach, the other wedged down into the crack of the couch. I felt the animal breath. Breathing in and out reminding my wild mind of life, death, aliens and soul-sucking-Spock-sackers. The hand wedged in the couch felt around for something more and found it. The alien. Wet and full of my death. My hand touched the black tar alien down deep in the crack.

Okay, it was probably just dog drool. But I was never the same. I freaked out, crying, and ran upstairs to huddle in bed with my sister. My dog-whistle frequency shrieks woke her up. She didn't believe that my alien was downsairs in the couch crack. She said the monster was only in my mind. I didn't believe her. I had come too close to the edge and had seen my own pending death. Taken the Trek at too young an age and now I knew I'd have to die. Innocence, lost. Spock, lost. Lost in space. Surely I'd be next to die.

The next day I felt ok, until night came. Time for bed, my mother told me. In my room, I was left alone. Reluctantly lying in the dark, a pit of fear expanding in my stomach to the size of Earth. No longer did the play of shadow and light from passing cars entertain me. Each was just another black monster/alien outline. My mind saw it all very clearly:

The black tar alien under the open sky on top of Dart Hill, oozing down the road towards that deadly final curve and my house. Turning into my driveway and I sit up in bed, screaming for my mother. My room wasn't safe after that; I couldn't be left by myself in a world of black tar aliens. For the next decade I slept on the couch in my living room, was taken to two psychologists, and fed my mind a lifetimes more peanut butter and cheese sandwiches. The kind that stick.