The woman with whom I've shared the last fifty-plus years has developed an alarming new symptom. She disappears in markets.
We'll be together, innocently pushing the basket in the vegetable section, for example, and I'll wander off to fetch some cream cheese and a half-gallon of milk. When I return, she's gone. Nowhere to be found. I walk up and down the neighboring aisles. Nothing. She's completely dematerialized. I walk up and down, back and forth, vainly searching.
After a twenty minutes, or half-an-hour, she's back, but teleported to an an entirely different part of the store. She doesn't even know that she has vanished. Sometimes she pretends that it's I who has disappeared.
I can understand that she could lose herself in the acre-and-a-half King Soopers, or in the McGuckin prairie, or on the vast Costconian steppe. But in Bradford's minuscule P & C? Or in Bradford's Main Street, comprised as it is of far fewer square feet than any mid-size contemporary Walgreen's? No, there's more here than meets the eye. This is no natural process. Something supernatural is going on.
It took some serious reflection before I came to the realization that it's a clear case of abduction by aliens. There is no other credible explanation.
I've given a name to the disorder. I call it Spousal Transient Alien Abduction Syndrome, or STAAS.
I've made some inquiries, and it seems that STAAS is not a condition found only in my family. In fact, it's quite common. More than four-fifths of the people that I questioned had experienced recent instances of STAAS. Curiously, it's much more frequently discovered in long-marrieds than among the recently-hitched. And less common among women than men. In fact, men tend to disappear for longer periods of time than women.
Moreover, just as might be expected, not a single one of the disappeared remembers that he (or she) had ever fallen into the ungentle hands of aliens -- which is certain proof that the abduction took place, inasmuch as it is well known that these extraterrestrial beings possess the ability to scrub human brains and obliterate memory.
I don't know what can be done to arrest the spread of this alarming syndrome. Perhaps a Federal task force.
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