UFOs Appear in Coon Creek, Ohio
An excerpt from “Hinky Memorial Dinky Day,” the latest novel in “Holidazed” series of cultural satires by Gregg SAPP
Coon Creek will never be the same when, a week before Memorial Day, UFOs appear above the town.
Some people in Coon Creek say they are invading aliens. Others insist they are signs of the Second Coming.
An old hermit named Johnny Appleseed says it’s the dreaded Hinky Dinky, and restless spirits must be satisfied. He invites a psychic, a sociologist, and an environmentalist to join him in a séance to learn what they want before the town turns against itself.
When Boog Tuttle pushed open the Drink Here Tavern’s doors, he stopped abruptly. A bright beam of light slammed into him, and it felt like being caught in a police searchlight. In that moment, Boog felt his heart going thump, thump, thump.
“What in the blue blazing hell is that?” he asked the sky.
Suffused in hot radiance, Boog felt his skin tingling and the hair on his head burning. White noise filled his mind, like some unknown language was overwriting his thoughts. Pressure built up between his ears. Consciousness was leaking through the cracks in his skull and gathering in a cloud above his head. Boog later reflected that it felt like being outside of his body, and in that moment, it seemed like it would last forever.
Until it didn’t. The light released him — it was like being dropped from a height — and retracted to a point high in the sky, where it turned bright yellow and formed into an oblong disk. It looked like a football on fire, hovering above him.
Meanwhile, the entire tavern emptied, and the Galoots huddled outside bending their necks backwards, staring at this bizarre, unidentified aerial phenomenon. The blob of light broke into four separate points and moved clockwise in respect to each other, then abruptly streaked in the four directions of the horizon, leaving behind luminescent contrails across the sky. The Galoots watched in anxious silence while the vapor trails dissipated.
For a second, the sky looked normal again, until in a flash the points of light reappeared, each at one of the four cardinal directions, as if in the few seconds since they’d disappeared, they circumnavigated the Earth and returned to the opposite side. The lights coalesced back into a single sphere, then zoomed higher and higher until out of sight.
The first person to speak was Zeke, who pointed and hollered, “That there was a flying saucer from outer space!”
“A goddamned UFO,” Wally agreed, “come right here to Coon Creek.”
“It was beautiful,” Red Ryan chimed, although Paddy O’Brien worried, “Do you reckon it’s full of alien invaders?” to which Tank Turner replied, “They could squash us like cockroaches.”
The drinkers rattled off assorted questions and speculations. “What do they want?” “Do you think they’ll land?” “It might could be the War of the Worlds.” “Let’s give ’em a big welcome instead.” “We should call 9–1–1.” “We should call Oprah.”
Boog rapped his knuckles against his forehead, trying to wake up the brain cells that seemed to have gone to sleep. To him, the mixed voices all sounded like gobbledygook, until one person’s words cut through.
Mayor Burl Slocum announced. “I’m going to call a town hall meeting!”
1: THE CHRISTMAS DONUT REVOLUTION — All Huck wants for Christmas is a revolution… and donuts. Vive la Revolution!
2: HALLOWEEN FROM THE OTHER SIDE — Delphyne Shadow is Solomon’s ex-girlfriend from hell — literally. At Halloween, she returns for his soul.
3: MURDER BY VALENTINE CANDY — Oh, the irony! Billionaire ladies’ man Adam Erb is murdered by lethal valentine candy.
4: UPSIDE-DOWN INDEPENDENCE DAY — Neighboring small towns, Coon Creek and Golden Springs, Ohio, enter their own little war, and may never be the same after the coming Fourth of July celebration.
5. THANKSGIVING, THANKSGOTTEN, THANKSGONE — When the doors to the North Columbus Wow-Mart open at midnight on Black Friday, ringing in the “Wowzathon” event of the century, chaos breaks out.
6: NEW YEAR’S EVE 1999 — Will New Year’s Eve 1999 ring in a new millennium? Or will it be the end of the world as we know it?
7: MOTHER-FRACKING EARTH DAY — When the Earth Day parade’s grand marshal is kidnapped, whiz sociologist Huck Carp teams with a hermit calling himself Johnny Appleseed to solve the case.
