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Allison

James Hagan

First Printing, 2024

Prelude

It was the year 1988 and despite the harsh weather experienced throughout those sad moments, the digging continued. The sky, just a grey overcast, the cold drizzle continuing as it had for the last five days without letup. Not to mention that there was an eminent threat of a tornado passing through their area. The children were frightened. With lightning strikes very close by, the winds howling with gusts strong enough to knock little Rebekkah into the surrounding mud. Twins Paul and Pauline yelling over the sound of what seemed like pending doom:

“Mother, we must get out of this weather before we all die.”

Allison’s brothers managed to pull their sore bodies from the four-foot-deep grave, dirt caked under their cracked nails, their tattered clothes now in desperate need of a wash that wouldn’t come for days. Silently they stood next to their mother, her hands folded around the tissue she pressed to her lips to muffle her cries.

The old Iowa cornfield, just a stubble as the corn crop had long been harvested, served as the focal point of this clandestine gathering. The dig site’s location was in the very northeast corner of the farm property---gravestones peppered the landscape; ancestors laid to rest. This particular casket was quite small, Allison was only four years old, barely taking up the space allotted.

Uncle Bubba, brother to Allison’s mother was not a carpenter by trade, but nevertheless had pieced together from old scrap wood he found the best he could. The burial was sudden, leaving very little time for anything more formal. The grave diggers, children themselves, finally decided that four feet was as deep as they cared to go.

“If anyone wants to continue digging to arrive at the customary six feet, fine, let them do it,” said Charlie. “This motley crew of cold, freezing amateur grave diggers have had it. As much as I loved Allison when she was alive, I doubt if she had wanted us to freeze to death just so she could be laid to rest. Why could we not have waited for another time when the weather was nicer escapes me.”

Allison had been healthy, most of the time, until her first bout with pneumonia, after that things changed. She struggled to breathe at times, and now with the slightest cold, her little body struggled. This last case of pneumonia was more than her frail body could take. Perhaps, had anyone been able to travel the five miles to the small town’s only pharmacy, her suffering could have been relieved, even if for only a short period.

Allison had the misfortune of being the fifth child born to a man whose only possession was a dying farm. The Dawkins had little more than family to their name and now even that was starting to slip through their fingertips. Besides, Peggy herself, suffering from the lasting effects of a Hepatitis A virus, was in no shape to raise another child this late in life.

Peggy’s husband—the deceased Allison’s father-- Robert Dawkins, unlike Peggy, had never known anything but farming. Farming, as a livelihood, as Robert was well aware---is a tough, hard job: and a gamble to boot. If the seasonal rains do not come, and the annual planting of seeds do not get underway at the right time, a farmer stands a good chance of losing his entire crop for the year--if the bank refuses to extend a loan for the next planting season, a farmer loses everything.

Robert Dawkins was an only child. With the sudden passing of his parents to a deadly strain of influenza, Robert realized he needed someone to help run the farm. Peggy was the perfect choice. After a brief period of courtship, the two got married, moving to Robert’s little farm. At first, farm life was fun and challenging---with Robert working hard to make the farm a success. With the arrival of the fourth child, Rebekah, Robert began to drink excessively, adopting some type of wanderlust, absenting himself from the farm sometimes for weeks. That is when the farm Peggy cherished so much began its descent downhill.

Peggy, now Dawkins, no longer Raulerson, did her best to raise her family with the help of her siblings, Paul, Pauline, Charlie, and Rebekah, with little or no help from a drunken, unreliable husband: a husband who seemed to disappear when his appearance and help around the farm was needed the most. At present, Robert was off driving a farming combine harvester. Traveling around the Midwest and Canada, helping other wheat growers with their harvest. All the combine tractor workers, except Robert, had returned home at the end of the wheat harvesting. season. So, where was Robert? Robert, instead of returning home like the other combine workers, was holding out in some small town, caring on with his drinking until every cent of his earnings were exhausted.

From her childhood, Ms. Dawkins had suffered from Hepatitis A, a viral infection of the liver from which she never fully recovered. As a result of the disease, Peggy was left weak and often confused. With her family of four children, Peggy was quite happy despite the occasional flare-up of her viral infection until Robert, in one of his drunken moods forced her into having sex resulting in the birth of Allison. Forcing Peggy to have sex against her will, which, by anyone’s calculation is spousal rape. The courts are just now catching up. The fact is what Robert did was a crime, and Robert should have been ‘made’ accountable for his wrongdoing.

But that was then, and this is now. Having Allison this late in life was difficult enough for Peggy. The ordeal left her saddened and depressed. It was a blessing her children did not inherit any of her quirky personality traits brought on by the virus. From close observation, they seemed to be quite happy and healthy until Allison developed pneumonia which she was unable to recover from. During her short life, Peggy had grown to love her with all her heart and prayed for her recovery.

Digging away in the freezing slime and mud for what seemed like an eternity, the small, bereaved family, mumbled a brief blessing over poor Allison’s makeshift grave, returning to their sad home to settle in for another, uneventful evening. Tomorrow, they surmised would be no different; just another, cold, drizzly day. Much the same weather conditions as it had been for nearly the entire winter, they thought.

Just as the family began to retire for the evening, Charlie spoke out: “I thought I heard a loud noise just now. Like something falling from the sky, traveling at what seemed like a horrific speed, plowing into the earth.”

“Charlie,” responded Rebekah. “You have been out here in the rain and cold way too long. What next? A little Martian, appearing at the front door, demanding that we dig up little Allison so they can take her back to Mars to conduct experiments on her body?” ***

As all of this drama was being played out in Iowa, on a faraway mysterious planet, which we earthlings knew nothing about at the time, one supporting intelligent life, a strange phenomenon unlike any ever recorded took place. A family living on this mysterious planet had ordered a pilotless aerial taxi to transport them to another city.

The conveyance, having arrived on time, with the father placing their small four-year-old child in her own personal capsule made of heat-resistant material. The type of material not found on planet Earth. The special capsule was magnetically attached to the main frame of the aerial taxi, a common means of transport in and around the cities of that planet.

The trip was supposed to go smoothly without any interruptions. A trip the family had taken numerous times. But, for some mystical reason, a strong magnetic storm flared up just about the time the family began their journey, with strong magnetic forces tearing the little capsule from the main body of the carrier. With ferocious speed, the small child was hurled out into the unknown on a journey with an unexpected outcome. With incredible ease and luck, the small craft plummeted into space.

After many hours of non-interruption, the small space capsule, after being furiously tossed around in an unfriendly cosmos, with heat so hot that most substance would have melted into oblivion within seconds of such hostile temperatures, miraculously righting itself, landed in the exact Iowa cornfield where poor earthling, Allison was recently immortalized.

The alien, extraterrestrial child, in the process of deplaning from her small, comfortable capsule was shocked when her little feet, with just the covering of a very thin material, part of her space uniform, splashed into nothing but cold mud. Although highly intelligent, she was, after all, just a child. And like most small children was frightened, disoriented, and feeling intense pain from the cold rain. Something she would never expect to experience on her home planet---very hungry from her long journey and ordeal, looked around to see if there were any signs of life to reach out to.

Landing on an alien planet, which she suspected she had, she had to worry about contracting an infectious foreign disease. Frightened and disoriented, her mind going in all directions.“ Where am I? Mom? Dad?” She called.

Desperate for them to have followed her to this place. her voice cracked through the silence “Where is this place,” she thought. Her eyes grazed across the barren field. She looked around to see if there was anything, anything at all, she might remotely recognize. She looked for any sign of life she might reach out to, but she felt alone in the void of nothingness. “Is someone coming to rescue me---but how would she know wasn’t she still on planet Zorbus?”

Aware that nothing made any sense and just standing in this freezing mud would bring about no answers, she began to slowly make her way to what looked like a front door of a very strange dwelling. A structure unlike any she had ever seen where she came from. Timidly, the frightened child knocked on the front door. What came next was the sound of running, barking dogs. Something totally unfamiliar to the alien child’s extraterrestrial ears. Petrified. Filled with absolute terror---having the sudden urge to run away.

But sadly, her little feet would not obey---wedged to the floor she was standing on---out of sheer fright would not move. The strange, mysterious door was suddenly yanked open, revealing someone with an obvious shocked expression on his face. It was Paul, the deceased Allison’s oldest brother.

Thinking at first, he was seeing a ghost, his eyes grew to the size of a small pie plate. Was he seeing an apparition? His ability to speak momentarily frozen on his tongue, finally managed to get himself together and control of his speech in time to let out a huge yell:

“Mom! Mom! Come quick. Allison is not dead. She is here, standing at the front door, too cold and frightened to talk.”

It would seem only natural that the question comes up,begging for an answer: “Why did the Dawkins family think that this extraterrestrial unkempt waif showing up at the Dawkins’s front door in the middle of the night was a reincarnation of the child they had recently buried?” There are no easy answers. Perhaps the alien child is a doppelganger---a non-biologically related look-alike double of their recently passed, Allison.

We often hear the expression: “There is another person somewhere in our hemisphere who looks just like you.” If true, is not it possible someone living on another intelligent planet can also look just like you? In the far recesses of the hearts of each member of the Dawkins family, they must have known the real Allison was dead. That she would not return from the dead. Perhaps deep down they just simply wanted to believe. The human attachment was just too strong to break - they just wanted Allison back and alive.

Fast forward---Present day, year 2008

Professor Dawkins having just completed her presentation to a large audience of college professors and students on her archaeological findings while on a dig in the Republic of Zambia, mainly explaining the finding of an historical skeleton, thousands of years old when she was suddenly interrupted with faculty members and students alike, exiting the auditorium. Rushing down the hallway, congregating in the break room. where the only TV set on their wing of the building was stationed, you knew this was not going to be your normal workday.