Excerpted from
What the Aliens Left Me by Patrick David MacKondy Copyright © 1998 FATE Magazine September 1998
Twinsburg, Ohio, was a great place to raise a family in 1966. I was a dapper, sandy-haired six-year-old. I lived in a beautiful new apartment complex with my father, mother, and sister. My father was an advertising director for a regional grocery chain, and he was in the process of building us a stately Colonial house down the street. I have wonderful memories of waiting for my dad to get home from work at 5:30. We would walk to our future home to check on the day’s progress. Even today, when I smell freshly cut plywood or drywall, memories of those days rush back to me.
Our next-door neighbors were Dutch. They were excited because their dearest friends from Holland were moving to the United States and were going to rent the apartment across the street. They said that I would have a new playmate named Lazette. I wasn’t crazy about playing with a girl and hoped we would move before she arrived.
My wishful thinking came to naught, however. Lazette and her parents moved in, and that summer she drove me crazy by trying to be one of the boys.
One afternoon Lazette and her parents begged my parents to let me spend the night at their apartment. This would be the first time that I had ever slept over at anyone’s house.
We went to the movies, out to eat, and back to their apartment. I put my pajamas on and went to bed in Lazette’s bedroom. Strangely, Lazette slept between her parents in their room and left me all alone.
Later that night, I woke up to find both of her parents looking at me. Their noses were only inches from mine, and I was frightened. I must have passed out or fallen back to sleep. When I awoke again, I was outside, alone, looking up into the sky at a bright beam of light that must have been 10 or 12 feet in diameter. I watched the light shrink until it went back up into the sky.
I heard a male voice in my mind. “We will see you again someday when you are a lot older,” it said.
Lazette’s parents walked me back to the apartment, where I fell fast asleep. I was crying hard and wanted to go home. They were laughing. I thought I would never see my parents again.
The next day, I told my parents all about it. They said that the rich food I had eaten must have given me a nightmare. I knew it had been real, though, because Lazette’s parents had been outside in their pajamas, and that morning I had seen mud on Lazette’s mother’s slippers while she prepared my breakfast.
Time passed and I tried to put the memory of that night out of my head. I knew that something strange had happened to me, but I didn’t know what. As I got older I told myself that it had been one heck of a nightmare. But something deep inside me remained unsettled.
Find out more in the September 1998 issue of FATE.
Patrick David MacKondy is a creative director for a cable television advertising company. He lives in Poland, Ohio.
Copyright © 1998 FATE Magazine P.O. Box 64383, St. Paul, MN 55164-0383