#tglc jan 97

[greenlodgecypher]

The Florida Question, 3/3

Part 2

Back in '39, I don't think people thought about flying saucers the same way they did after all those scifi movies in the fifties. It was before Kenneth Arnold, too. Besides, the lights weren't silver crescents, anyway-- these were just lights. It started off that a rancher or maybe someone driving home late at night would see a bright light off in the distance. Grandma wasn't sure how many; nobody thought much of it, apparently, until one of the local police saw a light fly over his car and out over the water. After that, people started paying attention, and they started to talk. It was May by then, and Grandma wasn't helping out as much in the kitchen because she was getting near to graduating high school. So when some of the guys at her school came in all excited, talking about how there were lights above the ocean the night before, she didn't connect it to their mystery guests. Maybe it was the Germans, people wondered. Maybe it was some American scientist working on some kind of plane, people thought. And then, that's when they started to think about those 'guys from the Army'. The vacationers didn't like the attention very much. You can understand why-- it's probably creepy in its own right, having everybody in a small town suddenly blaming you and your friends for something weird. Most of the guys started checking out, but the photographer said he'd be staying on a while. He volunteered a rate increase to Uncle Art, and, well, that was fine by Art. He didn't go out on a boat anymore, though. Grandma said the charters and the fishermen weren't taking any chances. Then, one night, someone broke into the bed-and-breakfast. Grandma heard all about it the next day. The photographer guy was missing one of his photo boxes, one of those accordion-paper things you used to see, and he was sore about it. The day after that, some of her classmates found it. It had just been thrown away, down by one of the drainage ditches in town. Thing was, it wasn't full of photographs. The guy developed all his negatives, right? Well, all of these were photograms. The sort of thing you made by taking photo paper and exposing it under a light and holding up objects between the two so that they cast a shadow on the paper. Stark black-and-white image sort of things. Not an ocean picture in the batch. Every single print in that box was a different rendition of the same symbol. Grandma said it looked a bit like a letter P, but with a line through the loop 'but not the way a paragraph symbol does'. Every single print was the same symbol. But they were all different, each one made separately, and that was the beginning of the end for Uncle Art. It was just too weird for him. He wasn't so keen on keeping that guest after that, and soon the photographer guy left too. Soon the war proper broke out, and nobody really paid it any mind. It's not the sort of story that has a satisfying ending. They never figured out if the guys were military, or not. No mothership showed up to say hi. There was no explanation for the drawings. Everything just seemed to stop. And maybe it really was nothing--the Army men. Maybe the photographer made them photograms, the ones what got stolen, for the other guys. Maybe all of them were just doing art practice. You know. For their health. Like a therapy. But Grandma wonders about that. They lost a bunch of fishing boats during the war. People said it might be the Germans, or just the weather. But she thought about those lights, and that photographer, and all his trips out into the water. They saw him take a lot of photos in the water. She never did see the pictures taken underwater. She only saw the landscapes he'd taken from the shore.