Falling Friend

Oh brother, the things I do for friendship. Here I am at the last minute editing his short story so that he can enter it in some contest. I can’t complain too much, the story is pretty good, though really not my cup of tea. Sure, I write many things, but my main genre is poetry. This story definitely is not a poem, not even a free verse poem.

The story is excellent, but more fact than fiction, though who would believe it I do not know. It is also where we met. I can still remember that dreary night. It was pretty light out because of a full moon. I had been driving for over eighteen hours. Normally I would have stopped long before then to rest, but I was in a hurry to get home because I didn’t want to miss my little brother’s 19th birthday party.

My mind was mushy and only functioning on caffeine and will power. I caught something in my peripheral vision that startled me, I swerved, narrowly missing the falling body. At least I thought it was a body. It sure looked like a body. My car went off the road and into a ditch. That was all I remembered until I woke up on the side of the road, with a naked guy leaning over me. That woke me up out of my dazed stupor!

I remember how odd I felt. Odd because I had no pain and apparently no injuries, though I felt I should be badly hurt. I was traveling over sixty miles per hour when I went into the ditch, I should have been at least bruised up! I wasn’t though. In fact, the more I assessed my condition, the better I felt. There was a lot of confusion and discomfort because a naked dude was leaning over me asking if I was alright. “Where the hell did he came from and why is he was naked?” ran through my mind.

I sat up and looked at my car, or what was left of it. This caused even more distress for me. I should be dead from what I was seeing. The car was a total loss with the front end collapsed into the cab. The cab where I had been driving before the car went into the ditch after swerving to miss the body. Looking back at the road, there was no body!

I looked over to the naked guy, seeing concern in his eyes, and a slight golden glow. I must have been dazed and looked away. When I looked back, his eyes were a normal blue. They still had a look of concern, but they also conveyed intelligence and empathy. The rest of him looked normal. He was about my age and height, maybe a year younger, had longish blond hair that seemed unkempt, and an athlete’s physique. Quite normal, other than being naked in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of the night.

When I asked where he came from, he looked at me like he didn’t understand my question. He just kind of stared at me. It was a little creepy and about when I was ready to move away from he spoke up. The delay, rather than being creepy, now made sense in my mind. He was just thinking how best to answer. I relaxed until he told me he did not know. I asked his name. Still no idea. He also didn’t know why he was naked, or how he got there.

It took some time before anyone else drove by and saw us, though they didn’t stop. Apparently they called the highway patrol though, because a half an hour later a patrol cruiser pulled up. In that time I got my naked, amnesic friend dressed in some of my cloths that I found in the amazingly intact trunk of my totaled car. By this time the sun had risen and showed more of the state of my car. Even the state trooper was skeptical that I had been in the car before it crashed.

That had been thirty years ago. He remembered nothing prior to that night. We got to know one another well as I tried to help him find out about his past life. We found nothing, and his memory never fully returned. The only thing he really remembered was his name, Michael. Mom and dad kind of adopted him and my little brother accepted him as a kind of another big brother. He became an award-winning chef, and I became an author of contemporary poetry. Not award winning but successful, though it took some time and a lot of writing cramp to get here.

Out of nowhere Michael has taken up writing, so here I am reading about that night, but in a lot more detail than I remember. It must be fiction. I mean, it can’t be anything else. A nineteenth century cowboy that aliens abducted and returned naked to nineteen-eighty-five must be fiction, right?