The Creature At My Door

Lately we've been engulfed with sea fog. It creeps silently in at eventide, slinking through the streets, slithering down the sidewalks, smothering the houses and clinging to tree branches in a thick smoky mist. It hangs like a cloud until mid-morning. One cannot see a half a block ahead. The mist is damp and the air is dreary... One feels like one has dropped into the English moors or a scene from a 1950's horror movie where phantoms lurk and women in white disappear around the corner...

On such one foggy night, I headed to my front porch to turn the Christmas lights off. (Yes, believe it or not, I put up lights--pink of course--for the first time since Bob passed. But I digress.) So I opened the front door and in the misty night a dark shadowy creature stood, not two feet away, facing my door. It was 3 feet tall with a large head, slim body and some kind of tall collar obscuring its neck. My mouth dropped open, my heart skipped a beat, I slammed the door shut.

Standing in the foyer, heart pounding, I wondered what the dark shadowy figure could be and why it was at my door. My mind immediately flew to "the grays", you know those short, thin extraterrestrials who purportedly abduct humans, transporting them onto strange crafts and performing horrific medical experiments: Betty and Barney Hill. Whitely Strieber. Travis Walton. But why me?

Then I thought, perhaps, it was a figment of my imagination. Or a shadow cast by the mist. Not a creature at all. Especially not a "gray" alien. So I slid the chain lock on the door and slowly, silently, cautiously turned the crystal knob, opened the door a crack so I could peer outside with one eye.

It was still there. Hadn't moved. Standing erect at attention. Facing my door.

I shut the door. Quickly. Heart still pounding.

I wondered why Kona didn't bark. Then remembered I had just let her out the back and she was probably waiting for me on the back porch. 

I had an idea. Whatever the thing was, I'll scare it away. I flipped on the bright porch lights. Waited a few minutes and figuring it would work, I opened the door, slowly. The door creaked like a door in a haunted house...

And I saw it:

Yup, that's a flamingo umbrella! There was a card taped to its head which made the head larger in the dark. But for the life of me, I couldn't figure out who it was from. The names inside the card are unfamiliar. I believe it's a neighbor... a new neighbor, whose names I don't know, but whom I've spoken to on several occasions. So last night, in the dark mist, I crept across the street and left a gift on their doorstep with a flamingo christmas card attached to it.... I do hope I figured right!