A Saucer of Loneliness Read Free

No one had ever been so kind to her before, but she soon learned that no one was being kind to
her
. They were just getting her to relax, to think of other things, so they could suddenly shoot that question at her: “What do you mean it talked to you?”
    Pretty soon it was just like Mom’s or school or any place, and she used to sit with her mouth closed and let them yell. Once they sat her on a hard chair for hours and hours with a light in her eyes and let her get thirsty. Home, there was a transom over the bedroom door and Mom used to leave the kitchen light glaring through it all night, every night, so she wouldn’t get the horrors. So the light didn’t bother her at all.
    They took her out of the hospital and put her in jail. Some ways it was good. The food. The bed was all right, too. Through the window she could see lots of women exercising in the yard. It was explained to her that they all had much harder beds.
    “You are a very important young lady, you know.”
    That was nice at first, but as usual it turned out they didn’t mean her at all. They kept working on her. Once they brought the saucer in to her. It was inside a big wooden crate with a padlock, and a steel box inside that with a Yale lock. It only weighed a couple of pounds, the saucer, but by the time they got it packed, it took two men to carry it and four men with guns to watch them.
    They made her act out the whole thing just the way it happened with some soldiers holding the saucer over her head. It wasn’t the same. They’d cut a lot of chips and pieces out of the saucer and,besides, it was that dead gray color. They asked her if she knew anything about that and for once she told them.
    “It’s empty now,” she said.
    The only one she would ever talk to was a little man with a fat belly who said to her the first time he was alone with her, “Listen, I think the way they’ve been treating you stinks. Now get this: I have a job to do. My job is to find out
why
you won’t tell what the saucer said. I don’t want to know what it said and I’ll never ask you. I don’t even want you to tell me. Let’s just find out why you’re keeping it a secret.”
    Finding out why turned out to be hours of just talking about having pneumonia and the flowerpot she made in second grade that Mom threw down the fire escape and getting left back in school and the dream about holding a wine glass in both hands and peeping over it at some man.
    And one day she told him why she wouldn’t say about the saucer, just the way it came to her: “Because it was talking to
me
, and it’s just nobody else’s business.”
    She even told him about the man crossing himself that day. It was the only other thing she had of her own.
    He was nice. He was the one who warned her about the trial. “I have no business saying this, but they’re going to give you the full dress treatment. Judge and jury and all. You just say what you want to say, no less and no more, hear? And don’t let ’em get your goat. You have a right to own something.”
    He got up and swore and left.
    First a man came and talked to her for a long time about how maybe this Earth would be attacked from outer space by beings much stronger and cleverer than we are, and maybe she had the key to a defense. So she owed it to the whole world. And then even if the Earth wasn’t attacked, just think of what an advantage she might give this country over its enemies. Then he shook his finger in her face and said that what she was doing amounted to working
for
the enemies of her country. And he turned out to be the man that was defending her at the trial.
    The jury found her guilty of contempt of court and the judgerecited a long list of penalties he could give her. He gave her one of them and suspended it. They put her back in jail for a few more days, and one fine day they turned her loose.
    That was wonderful at first. She got a job in a restaurant, and a furnished room. She had been in the papers so much