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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ForceUser" data-source="post: 2677770" data-attributes="member: 2785">The following is an excerpt from a short story I wrote for a creative writing class, based upon actual conversations I've had with my family. I was going to rewrite it as a post, but, well, I'm lazy. It was eerie listening to people I've know my whole life talking about supernatural things they believe they saw. I still get the heebie-jeebies.~~~~~My dad saw a spirit last year.  My brother saw it too.  They saw the same spirit on different occasions.  According to them, it’s not a ghost.  I learned about it while visiting them in Louisiana.This is my dad’s story.  He awoke one morning to sunlight streaming through his floor-length bedroom window.  He was lying with his back to the window, then he rolled over in an effort to get more comfortable.  This is when he saw the spirit.  He told me that it was naked and silver-skinned.  He told me that it must have been no taller than two or three feet because it stood at eye level with him while he lay in bed.  It was standing amid the flowers outside his bedroom window, looking in.  He described it as impossibly thin, with huge almond-shaped eyes, spiky black hair and tall pointy ears.  Its outline was hazy and indistinct. It looked like air.The spirit stared at my dad for several seconds, and he lay there staring back at it. He says he couldn’t seem to focus on it.  Finally, it turned its head to the right and sunk rapidly into the ground and disappeared.  In profile, he said it had a long nose.On shift that night, my dad spent hours drawing and redrawing the creature.  He settled on an image he felt best represented his encounter and hung it over his bar when he got home from work.  This is how I learned he’d seen a spirit.  I was lounging in his bar and saw the image and commented on it, and he filled me in.  To me, the picture he drew looked like a black silhouette of a slender, pointy-eared, spiky-haired creature.  He’d drawn a haze around it using a cross-hatching technique.  He’d drawn it in ballpoint ink and framed it.  I thought it could be a fairy.I asked my dad what he thought it was. “Sh-t, son, I don’t know,” he replied.I was on the verge of skepticism, but then he added, “Eric’s seen it too.”My brother is an extremely rational person.  He works with some Air Force covert ops group.  My dad is a nut.  “You sure?” I asked.  I wanted to believe.  I wanted to believe so badly.That night Eric and I drove to see some friends in Baton Rouge.  Our conversation went something like this:“Dad told me about the thing he saw.  The fairy.”“It’s not a fairy.”“How do you know it’s not a fairy?”“We don’t know what it is.”“So it could be a fairy,” I pressed.  I played Dungeons & Dragons twice a week.  I needed this.“It’s not.”“Well, it’s supernatural at least.”“How do you know it’s supernatural?  We don’t know that.  We don’t know anything.”I began to feel exasperated.  “Well, what do you think it is?  An alien?”“It’s not an alien.  It’s…I don’t know what it is.”  He shrugged and smoked a cigarette.  I slouched in the passenger seat, annoyed.  I wanted to know. I decided to try another tack.  I felt surreally outside of myself, like I was watching a movie starring us, and our characters were driving along a dark road at night, talking about spirits by the dim light of the dashboard.  I said, “So tell me what you think it is.”“I dunno.”“Can’t you take a guess?”He puffed his cigarette and shifted his grip on the wheel.  I think he was getting irritated at me.  I didn’t care.  I demanded validation of my interpretation.  I knew what I wanted the creature to be.  I felt cheated for not having seen it myself.  Wasn’t I the one who lived in a fantasy world half the time?  It wasn’t fair.  I wanted to experience everything I could about this creature vicariously.  I pulsed with excitement and vague fear.“I don’t know what it is,” he repeated, “I only know I saw it.  It exists.  It’s presumptuous to call it supernatural, though, because you’re assuming that just because humans haven’t documented and categorized it, it must be abnormal.  There’s a lot we don’t know about the way the universe works.  It could be as natural as anything and we’ve just never seen it before.  It might have a purpose that we’re unaware of.”What a rational answer. I remained unfulfilled.I decided to believe that the creature was some sort of nature spirit.  I hesitate to call it a fairy.  I wish I could do so without feeling inauthentic. I didn’t tell Eric that I wanted to know how it belonged in the universe as I perceived it.  I lacked the humility to accept what was told to me for what it was.  I took their stories as incontrovertible proof. Of what, I couldn’t exactly say.  I only knew that I desperately needed to believe that there was something more to the 21st century than fast food, American Idol and Iraq.</blockquote>

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