Alien Reincarnation in Midtown Manhattan

Brendan couldn’t help but stare back. No one in Manhattan ever made eye contact! He thought. It was taboo. So who was this girl staring at him so hard?

She gave him the creeps. Her long hair was almost white it was so blond-and naturally so-and her eyes were round and dark like coals. Her walk was something stiff-legged. She seemed like a mannequin, skinny as they came, and relatively flat-chested. Her face was probably what some people called pretty, but Brendan didn’t care for the look in her eyes. She didn’t look dangerous, maybe a little crazy, but then who in New York wasn’t just a little? And he’d seen stranger things in Manhattan than a girl with white hair who stared at strangers.

He got up to leave after she disappeared over the wooden bridge nearby, and hurried south a bit, past a children’s playground and tennis courts, and then near the more popular avenues of the park.

But just as he was passing down the horse-lanes, the white-haired girl appeared from around a corner and ran right into him. For a girl so skinny, her shoulder was hard as a rock, he noticed ruefully, picking himself up and dusting off rotting leaves. She didn’t apologize, but waited a moment, then grabbed his shoulder as he tried to leave.

"Who do you think you are?" he shouted, trying to free himself, but she was strong. Very strong. And he didn’t feel like yanking free in front of people, in case he couldn’t. That realization hit him in his gut. Who on Earth was she? He thought, jarred mentally. How dare she be so strong?

"Do you remember who you are?" she asked back, in a voice that was short and stilted. And as she looked at him with those big coal-black eyes of hers, he shuddered. Though he would have laughed if anyone else had asked him that. "Do you remember?" she asked again, as he just stared at her.

He shook his head slowly, dismissed her. "Lady, you’re crazy."

As if agreeing, she gave a dark, low laugh that sounded like the hiss of a hot iron poker being immersed into water. And as she let him go, she said, in a strange, sad way, "I missed you both." Tears welled in her eyes and dripped to the mud like water from a leaking pipe, falling over her smooth, unflinching face. The transformation of the look in her eyes from ice to anguish was both sudden and complete.

Now he knew she was crazy. And yet as he left her there and went back to his apartment to change for the evening, he found he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

Thankfully, the guys helped him to. They met, the usual after-work group, at about eight in the Irish pub, and drank and swapped stories until it was very late. And they were nearly drunk as they piled into taxies, with lady-friends, to head to another night place. Brendan, the usual ladies’ man, found himself a philosophical, angry drunk for a change. Maybe too much vodka this time. Vodka had a way of making a man think deep thoughts, when all he wanted to do was trip the light fantastic and throw caution to the wind. He should have remembered that, he reminded himself, and stuck to whisky and margaritas.

Deflated, tired, and sick of noise, Brendan returned to his small, empty but immaculately decorated two-roomed apartment, with its always-empty fridge and ever-increasing pile of dry-clean only suits needing cleaning in one corner of his room. And as he sat there pulling off his dress shoes and socks, his mind returned to the damned white-headed girl he’d met at Central Park. She had ruined his day! Just ruined it! Why couldn’t he shake the memory of this meeting, out of so many thousands of routine meetings on the streets of New York?