conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Saucers, Landed, span>"In with the genre: Humor & Entertainment, Humor?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'After the Saucers Landed'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After the Saucers Landed
  My wife takes a sip of ice water and then places the dark yellow Vaseline tumbler back down a bit too heavily so that it cracks. Ice, water, and yellow-tinged glass flow across the dirty Formica and Virginia starts sucking her thumb. She's bleeding and her hands are trembling.
  I wait for her face to change, for the flat line of her lips to soften, or for anything that might indicate that she's past it, but her panic doesn't fade. She's staring at Harold and her mouth is held in a tight frown. She's waiting for the next thing to happen and she keeps staring at Harold the whole time.
  Virginia shakes her head no, but I can't tell if she's answering or rejecting the question. She picks up her napkin and starts to clean up the mess she made with her water glass, but stops to suck her thumb again. Then she stands up to leave. "Excuse me," she says.
  Virginia is wearing an off-white sweater dress with a high turtleneck collar and a short hemline. She twists to step sideways around a rather rotund transvestite at the diner's counter and I realize that this new outfit is provocative. She looks different, is dressed differently than is the norm. Her sweater dress is too short for one thing and I'm staring at her legs as she twists again. Not only is she exposing a lot of leg, but she's barefoot. All in all she seems exposed, maybe a bit vulnerable. When the transvestite gets up from his stool at the counter, when he follows her around the corner, I wonder whether I should go back there myself to make sure she's okay.
  For a moment I think Harold is confused, that he's stuck in the last scene, but as he takes a fry and dips it in the little paper cup of ketchup I rationalize. Virginia was one of his abductees, one our clients. Harold and I have that in common. I met Virginia for the same reason Harold met Carole, because she wanted to know what her saucer sighting meant. In that context, Harold's question might make a bit of sense?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Patricia found the key again, ran her fingers through her straightened hair, licked her lips, and then stepped back inside. She wanted Shelly to have the impression that she would be right back, she had that impression herself, but once she was behind the closed door, standing in the dark lobby of the Community Center, she didn't move. She stood there in the dark for ten minutes and then for another ten, and then another.
  The trouble with testimony gleaned from hypnotic regression is twofold. First, there is no evidence that a person's memory is improved through the use of hypnosis, nor is a person less likely to make a mistake or misremember when hypnotized than when fully awake and relying on conscious recollection. Second, a hypnotized person is suggestible. This is why hypnotism was popular as a sideshow act and in vaudeville during the late nineteenth century, it's why hypnotism can be used as a way to treat people with various addictions, and it's why abductees and contactees generally tell stories that reflect the worldview of the researcher. The hypnotized person remembers what the researcher wants them to believe, quits smoking at the hypnotist's request, and will cluck like a chicken if you ask them nicely.
  What Charles Rain asks this woman whose name we just learned might've been Patricia and might've been Shelly, and who claims to be Harold's wife Carole, is to remember what happened next. That is, he asks her to tell us what happened to her the day after she changed, after her body became somebody new and she hitched a ride in a new body.
  Patricia is coughing, waving her hand in front of her face, like she's waving away smoke, and Rain moves toward her. He gets out of his leather chair and kneels down next to her on the couch, as if the closer proximity will help him, as if he can make her listen.
  The Telecafe was a small espresso bar near Mt. Scott Community Center, located just a couple of blocks away from where Patricia lived in SE Portland, and Patricia tended to treat it as her second living room. She went to get a latte and bagel there around 8:30 a.m. on most days, before she caught her bus and went downtown to volunteer for the art museum, and the morning after her body changed this was where she went. She woke up at seven a.m., the usual time, waited for the bathroom down the hall from her apartment to be free so she could take a shower, and then got dressed up as was usual in a tartan-patterned black and red wool skirt, cashmere sweater, and sneakers.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last paragraph
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Gore Vidal meets Philip K. Dick in this collection of lit-fabulist stories. Douglas Lain's work has been attracting high profile attention throughout the field, and this collection features some of his finest and most controversial fiction.