Aliens: Flight of Despair (Short Story)
"Do Aliens exist? Of course they do! I have to make sure other people know, to prove I'm not crazy..." A short story in around 800 words.
Hi, all... It's been a long long while since my last post... This post is a new story, for the "Twenty-four hour short story contest for June 12" I don't remember taking part in @mctiller contest before, so I'm excited!! Especially with how hard today's theme made me think.
The theme:
A plane crashes, all passengers survive, but the crew is missing. No one remembers what happens except on terrified seven year old.
By the way, that should be "one."
But I took a huge freedom of using the theme, so the story might be IS very different from above, kind of.
Aliens: Flight of Despair
"Do Aliens exist?" My classmate must have noticed the book in my hand.
"They do," I read few lines, closed the book and looked him in the eye. "I'll prove it."
"Why are you so sure?" a confused, maybe sarcastic smile appeared on his face.
"I saw them." I put the book in my bag. "Not that you'll believe it, anyway."
"You saw wh-- Hey, don't ignore me!!" His voice sounded far away as I got out of the class, speeding up toward the club room.
Aliens do exist, as the head of the Super-natural club, I was responsible for researching the matter. I was less interested in proving the existence super-natural phenomenons, and more interested in proving my own sanity.
I opened my smart phone and messaged the other club members a reminder of our meeting. As I closed the messenger app I took a look at my phones background picture. It was a family picture taken ten years ago, my younger self held a toy airplane. My mother wore a pretty expensive dress. Father wore his usual job outfit, he was a pilot of a passenger plane.
I wanted to fly one like my father.
Maybe, I still do.
But a certain incident left only hatred in me.
"Was I late?" Danny closed the club's door behind him and went to his favorite chair across the room from mine. "Mahdi, are you reading that again?"
"There must be some proof." I skimmed through the newspaper scans saved on my phone, not looking at him. "Danny, we are not crazy, are we?"
"Yes, if it was only you..." He didn't continue, his case is more terrible than mine. "But no one believes us, it feels like we're trapped in a never ending cycle."
"Day one, a plane crash in the middle of a desert." As I skimmed through newspapers I cared to narrate the headlines. "Day three, All the passengers are safe, but no news on the planes crew yet. Day seven, still no trace of the crew or the cause of the crash."
"Heh, all they wanted is to get ht best scoop." Danny cursed under his breath for he knew about the next headline.
"Day thirteen," I felt my eyes tearing up as I overcome my hesitation. "They are aliens! a seven years old survivor claims."
I was excited that my father finally let us ride on one of his trips.
But suddenly, the plane started to fall by itself.
Miraculously, no one died... Yet.
They were who caused the plane crash.
I don't know if they understood us, as we didn't understand their speak.
But it seems my father did something...
The crew, decided to be taken instead of us.
Father's crew missing, and no one remembers anything.
No one except the terrified me!
"But in the investigation didn't continue," I put my phone down and turned to my friend. "They summed it as a child imagination."
"They didn't believe just because you were so young..." Danny readjusted his sitting position. "And worse, they treat us like crazy because of something they didn't witness. Not like I want anyone to see that."
"You're right Danny," I wouldn't want my hated enemy to see what I saw. "Yet. to able to live, and make something about our situation, we have to prove their existence."
"But even with all our evidence we couldn't convince anyone." a sigh escaped his lips.
"Well, at least my mother believed me." It wasn't because I'm her son either, it made sense to her after what we've been through. "Your case is worse, Danny, you know?"
"Heh, father was really a jerk." Danny forced as smile. "Nothing I could have said, might have saved him from being the suspect of my mother's murder. But, you believe me, Mahdi... Right?"
"Yeah," I know that deep that both Danny and his mother, loved his father. "Even if he's a jerk, I won't accept accusing someone of a crime they didn't do."
"Heh, that's the Mahdi I like." Danny glanced at his smart phone and raised his face in my direction. "Eh? A message from Sarah."
"Hm?" I looked at my phone, a new message titled "GAC," our secret code. "Got a clue."
""Sarah found something!!"" We couldn't hide our excitement.
"It says she'll present it in the next club meeting, that's... uh. Just in a half hour."
"Yeah, about the meeting." I remembered what it was about and opened the laptop on the club's main desk. "Our website, I finally finished it. Want to see it now?"
We are few steps closer to prove the truth behind that incident.
The End?
So how was it?
Character names this time are Arabic ones but I choose ones that make sense in English (The Arabic Danny name sometimes written as Dani, and Sarah is a multi-cultured name.) Mahdi on the other hand is true Arabic name, the names I used aren't meaningful narration-wise, so I hope non-arabic people didn't find following this story too hard.
I came up with this story as the third attempt for a story for this contest, the first one was what the boy has gone through in that year when he was seven. The second was the same but from the father perspective, and then I decided to make the protagonist a teenager boy who was treated like crazy... The club members came just to fill the gap in story but I found it interesting to think of them as a team.
What exactly happened to Mahdi 10 years ago?
How was Danny's mother was murdered in a way that makes his father seem guilty?
And what made the club members know each other?
Did that really happen to them, or are they as crazy as they fear?
What do you think?
Hope to see you in another story~