Author: Milo Brown
William Smith was very proud of his name, not because it was a very good name (although it was) but because it granted him a certain level of anonymity. In William’s opinion, the only better name would be John Doe, since the name John Smith was made famous, and in turn infamous, by Disney’s Pocahontas. William Smith was also very proud of his occupation; a common indulgence for white-collar Americans, but unusual in the sense that William had a true affinity for accounting, a passion few Accounting graduates could claim.
William enjoyed watching television, eating microwave dinners in front of the television, and walking his dog, Spot. His dog was in no sense spotted but rather very difficult to spot: Spot was a black lab who loved to dig in William’s backyard–a generous name for an untended dirt lot littered with holes and dried dog excrement–while the neighbors slept.
The sun would rise and the dog would rest and William would pour his instant coffee into a thermos of tap water; the sun would set and the dog would dig and William would go to bed. This is how life was for William, and this is how William liked life to be.
One morning, William noticed that Spot had dug in the same hole all night. Geez, he thought. What a weird dog. He poured his instant coffee into his tap water and drove his car to work.
The next day, the singular hole had grown slightly in circumference, and quite a bit more in depth. C’est la vie, thought William, who had picked up the phrase from the second Austin Powers movie and still wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I guess Spot really likes this hole.
By the third day, even William had to admit that he might have a problem. Perhaps the dog had found a colony of groundhogs–or, more likely, cockroaches. If this continues another day, thought William, I’ll call an exterminator.
Unfortunately for William, who would prefer to avoid a pack of exterminators (or anyone else) invading his solitude, the dog continued to dig, and so by the unspoken but otherwise quite binding pact that William had sworn with himself, the exterminator had to be called.
“We’re going to have to dredge up the whole,” the exterminator searched for an appropriate word for the shambling mess of dirt, before finally settling on “yard.”
“Hm,” grunted William. And so the exterminator and his crew began to dig.
A week passed without incident. The exterminators dug slowly to avoid the nonexistent sprinklers that watered the lawn William didn’t have. It seemed increasingly unlikely that the exterminators would find anything at all, be it sprinklers or cockroaches. But then, on a Tuesday afternoon, William received a call. He let it go to voicemail.
“You’d better come see this,” was all the exterminator said.
Now usually, William avoided such virtues as curiosity. Usually, he figured, things would work themselves out, and if they didn’t, he could forget about them. But something in the exterminator’s tone… Better to check.
As William pushed his way through his backdoor, the exterminator stared at something unseen beneath the house, his face awash with purple light. And then William saw it–a small dome peeking from beneath the house. Immediately, bizarrely, William knew what the object was, though it was neither flying, nor, in a sense, unidentified. There was an alien spaceship buried beneath his house. William stared in silence at the discovery that would break his solitude, his anonymity, and his privacy forever.
Excellent sci-fi story featuring the kind of mediocre Mind I find frustrating on this sometimes boring planet