My Seoul Man

Chapter 35

You ever watch The Day The Earth Stood Still? Not the Keanu one, the old 50s or 60s one with Gort, the scary as hell silver robot that incinerates everything it shoots its laser eye beam at?

C'mon, you remember that scene where that big eye is just about to zap that woman who's too scared to say "Klaatu barada nikto" like his alien master told her to. Everyone yells it at her as if she could hear them 'til she finally says it herself. Classic movie moment.

Well, I was lookin' at Gort and the flying saucer he came down to Earth in, in that movie.

I shit you not, people.

Back off in the trees just beyond the spot where I was having a mild heart attack, there was a huge, disk shaped...thing hovering a few feet above the ground. With that damned robot standing guard a few feet in front of it.

My mind went into glitch mode running through all the possible explanations and landed on how maybe they really had made movies out here.

And I was still in meltdown mode when I felt someone--or some...thing--tug on the plastic bag in my hand.

I let out a yelp, turned...

And found this really cute little red-haired girl standing there grinning up at me, cupping a hand full of the berries I'd picked.

"It's just a house," she said. Obviously used to people almost peeing themselves when they saw it.

I croaked out, "Your house?"

"My grandfather built it. He was kinda crazy."

That made me laugh like I was crazy. I think it was having all the tension relieved by her little devilish smile.

She had spooky almost navy-blue irises, but there was a sweetness in her freckly, dirt smudged face that got me past that.

I was really envious of her hip long, wavy and incredibly shiny red hair, too. It had these golden strands in it that glittered in the sunlight.

In fact, she looked like her grandpa might've built her, actually. Perfect little doll.

And she said, "Stadler's Starship. It's in books. And tourist stuff."

"Oh, you're famous, huh?"

She grinned even more and said, "Tourists don't come as much because the highway doesn't go through like it used to." Something her parents had probably told her.

"Are these your blueberries then?" I decided to ask.

"Nobody owns them. My grandpa thought the pioneers who came here a long, long time ago might have planted all the berries and things out here. He probably could've sold them or something back when he needed the money real bad, but he said they survived all that time on their own so we shouldn't start messing with them for money."

She looked up at a nearby tree then...and I saw where she'd come from. And envied the hell out of that, too, immediately.

It was a tree house. But I'm talking a house, not something slapped together for the kids. It had a thatched roof that made it look like something a Hobbit would live in.

And it was sitting in the crotch of this enormous ancient looking tree that looked like a giant had reached down and twisted it all up. The picture I took of it has been on the wall for years and everybody always thinks it was generated by AI or something.

"He built a lot of those, too," she told me, noticing how long my eyes lingered on that house.

And then she said, "And hogans, like the Navajos live in. I gotta go. Thanks for the berries."