Delusive Research

Yeah, Zach. I need you here at the house. Uh, its dad. Mom left something, anyway, talk to you soon. Thanks, bye.

Based on the transcript on his smartphone, Isaac stepped out of the pile of crap at work into another one. The Volvo he drove to the shack at the edge of the woods sounded like a sickly train whistle. The mechanic refused to order the part to replace it for another consecutive month; on the flip side, it drowned the intrusive hypothetical he hated talking about with his dad: Is bigfoot really an alien?

According to his dad, yes. In fact, there was irrefutable eye-witness testimony. His father was certain of it, just like how Isaac was certain he could find where his mother disappeared off to.

The brown shack was overrun by dense rose stalks, which climbed all the way to the window. The lawn was a pollination ground for butterflies, grasshoppers, and ticks. The oak front-porch door was ajar.

Isaac’s rested disappointment with the place and his dad was enough to question himself if the visit was worth it. The moment he entered, pungent foot rot and baked bean molasses wafted up his nostrils.

“Dad?”

“I’m up here, Zach!” he yelled from the second floor.

Trudging up the lefthand side stairs, Isaac saw the floor with ripped up newspapers, letters of past due debt, and tissues scattered like an unkept yard during the start of fall.

“Dad.”

“About time!” his father’s Tractor Supply Company poked out from the wardrobe and stuffed in some pepper-and-salt colored hair. Under the brim a hopeful set of blue eyes contrasted the crows feet.

“What is it?”

“What do you mean what?! I told you!”

“Not enough.

“Well here! She left this! Look.” The leathery hand with gray bristles held a letter that was opened.

The letter was weakly grasped. It read:

Isaac looked at one singular undated page with a sentence: Only pencil and paper can tell you how I truly feel -Maude. Three other pages were blank.

“You had this for how long?”

“I just found it! I dunno.”

Isaac mouthed the worst curse he could think of, knowing full well his mother would never just leave something.

“So, how about it! Did you find him?” his dad yammered whilst slamming a pencil and paper on his chest.

Isaac had to practice his deep breathing to calm down once more. “I’m working part-time at a Wal-Mart on top of doing Market Research, so no.”

“Did you look after that?”

“I have to pay for my place and get food before I can find an ape in the woods.”

“…but did you look?”

“No, obviously not!” the sandy blonde hair fell over his eyes.

“By the way, he’s a probe from The Grays at Roswell. Not an ape.”

Isaac rifled through the pages, letting the Sci-Fi terminology pass over his head. “And mom writes blank letters to you?”

“Just help me out, man, you’re smart enough.”

“To not believe this crap and look for something else that matters.”

“This isn’t crap! C’mon! It’s all real! Mom even said so, see?!”

“See what?!”

“Looky here!” He scampered across the room to show off something on the short dresser table, next to his many strange curios. “Mermaid purses. Mom even said it!”

Isaac’s hazel pupils narrowed on the curios. Chondrichthyes were proudly presented in a hermit crab box, that carried a label with a date: March 19th, 2015. Their anniversary was proudly commemorated with tidewrack. His favorite boyhood memory at the pet store of adopting finding Hermit Crabs was simply a tool.

“Whatever you say, dad. I’ll pretend I know what’s going on.”

“Great. Anyway, how’s marketing or whatever you sell?”

“I do market research, not market-ing.”

“Are the stickers going anywhere?! Name’s catchy, innit?”

“Can I please concentrate?”

“You never want to talk anymore!”

“Dad, you told me to read this. How am I going to read and talk?”

“Always the catch twenty-twos with you…”

Isaac couldn’t be asked to correct him and read along. Something felt rougher than normal printer paper on his fingertips.

“I mean can you believe this?! She might have a full-on Rosetta Stone for The Grays!”

“Don’t you think she’d tell you?”

“Well, yeah but the government, man! They’d kill her!”

“What?!”

“C’mon! They cover this up to fight the aliens with the Space Force! They just started rolling out mass-recruitment now by announcing it publicly. I mean the president said it’s official, but that obviously him playing it cool to not tell everyone that we’ve been fighting The Grays since Roswell. I mean, I see why they gotta keep stuff like this under wraps, but it sucks that we have to also do it until we find something big, you know what I mean?”

“No!” Isaac’s teeth and hand clenched. “Are you really that delusional?!”

“I only told you eight times, but I can’t understand it for you! There’s cover-ups and all that!”

“Have you thought to ask Grandma where she went!?” The smell of ginger sticky pudding with his mom and three cousins made his eyes wet.

“I can’t, the CIA wire-tapped it so I had to stop paying for the phone bill and not look suspicious. There’s an art to staying off the grid.”

Pale thin arms flopped to Isaac’s sides. “An art?”

“Yeah, see these? Burner phones, Zach! You should try it!" His dad pat the box.

If the government wants, so be it, I'm boring."

"Suit yourself. Put yourself out there. Oh! Speaking of, the bigfoot on the sticker will get people here!” His father shuffled the sticker out and grinned. “Pretty badass, right?” He pointed at the gel-shade of a poorly drawn hairy ape with no beard, carrying a camcorder in his six-digit paw.

“Sure, dad.”

“You’re sure you can’t move any of the stickers with that marketing job?”

“It’s market research, dad. And no.”

“And what’s the research say on your end about these stickers?”

Isaac was beside himself and released. “Dad, they think you’re some latently gay fetishist based off these.”

“You’re making this up! Slander!”

“The acronym, dad…”

“The what now?”

“It’s the acronym.”

“You’re acting like some stupid preschooler about this.”

Look who’s talking with this bigfoot stuff like a preschooler, saying there’s an art to running away from family. Isaac’s teeth grinded over this thought.

The key words preschool and art itched Isaac’s brain. “Say dad, got any other blank papers?”

“What’s that gotta do with stickers?”

“I can show you the acronym and you can see where!”

“Pfft, I know, it’s just horse shit!”

“Well can you get me blank papers anyway?”

“For what?”

“This.” Isaac flapped the letter in his hand.

“Why?”

“Just get me a blank paper, dad. I want to test something.”

His dad scoffed and lumbered around looking for anything blank, bunching up in a ball of unwashed, musty denim and flannel, pouring over the carpet of useless information. Highlighted tabloids, newspapers, and torn up books of every piece of “verified research” he had crinkled under his toes.

Isaac got impatient as he slowly felt the creases on the page. Isaac’s thumb read: “Dear Martin,” in cursive. Isaac’s heart beat against his ribs, diaphragm, stomach, throat, and spine.

“Dad! Hurry!”

“You hurry!”

“Good idea!” Isaac haplessly looked around and then muttered, “Fuck it.” He leaned on a B-Movie Poster and started to rub the pencil over the letter.

“You’re giving up now? Typical.”

Martin looked back at Isaac, seeing what he was supposedly desecrating and lunged for his arms, forcing one of them down.

Isaac showed the letter’s impressed text. “Look!”

“And that could be anything and you’re chancing it on that?!”

“It’s what I need! Shut up!”

“NO! YOU STOP! I NEED THAT TOO!”

“Mom said it was what pencil and paper could tell! Look!”

“STOP!”

“You’re not ruining this one chance I got!”

“The Grays talked to her, god damn it! That’s the key!”

“It’s a letter to you! It’s just written different!”

“From the Grays!”

“From mom!”

“She would have said what she had to say to me, not wrote it!”

“I haven’t seen her since she walked out on you! I need this!”

“SHE NEVER WALKED! SHE WAS KIDNAPPED!”

“SHE WALKED OUT YOU IDIOT!”

Martin’s fist flew into Isaac’s cleft. When it connected, Isaac wrangled the middle-aged man to the floor over the missing piece of a wretched puzzle. Screams and screeches over it were both cries to keep the piece in-tact for the sake of answering their question. Each grip, punch, slap, kick, toss, and wrench drummed the weak and rotting floorboards. Each bang and bump slowed as stamina waned.

Frantic rustling accompanied the wheezing from Martin’s limp body. The page rubbed in graphite was the only thing Isaac could find. Isaac gripped the pencil and started to rub again, hunched over like a vomiting cat.

“You’re always like this,” Martin panted. “You have to be a fed. Stepping in the way of everything.”

Each flat end stroke of the pencil wiped on the warm black with a burning white letter that was more painful than the next. The alienation and awe made each stroke a harrowing association with a past he thought was certain. Erratic strokes pressed against magazines, B-Movie posters, B.R.O.F.O.S. stickers, tax documents, graph paper with coordinates, and useless litter. Isaac held it up like a useless flag. Each stroke soiled a precious memory of Maude. The smile he wanted to see for so long was scowling, resentfully back at him.

“You’re a bastard. You know that, Zach?” Martin spat.

Regaining composure was useless at that point, but Isaac could stand. “Dad… you can read this whenever you want.”

“How?! It’s caked in pencil, you stupid piece of shit!”

Isaac spun the page and let it float on Martin’s chest. “Look at what the pencil didn’t pick up.”

Isaac made more trudges down the steps, careful not to slip and die on the way down. The muffled, miserable wail Martin made at the sight of the letter to him pushed him on to the car.

There was no mystery anymore. No imagination left to cloud Isaac’s pursuit. Only pain existed in the front of his mind. He turned on the engine, pretending to be in an alien space ship, enjoying the strange humming whistle it made.