A Science-Fictionalized Twilight Zone-esque Short Story
Based on Actual People and Events
by
John Wayne Haug, M.A.
Copyright 2025 John Wayne Haug, M.A
Dedicated to the memories of Rod Serling
(in 2024, the year of his 100th Birthday)
& my mother Nancy
With eternal thanks to my wife Mona and our family,
Including my “Buddy” Jack & “My Jenni” and my high school teacher George Waibel
(“Future of Fiction” Sci-Fi English/FHS 1984)
Opening Narration
The cul-de-sac street—the proverbial in through the out door. You drive in one end only to turn back around and head out from whence you came. But for one boy, this epic journey of 20 years is not unlike the Tales of Great Ulysses. With one step, he will be propelled into the past by a bit of shaking of the ground and the stirring of certain memories that will transform him into a man and a father freed from the trials of his past with the help of a certain mentor—a maternal angel from Heaven, and…The Twilight Zone.
Act I
The place is Orangewood—a city once strewn with groves of orange trees, in which there is now a small suburban neighborhood with one particular dead-end street—a cul-de-sac maybe only a little more than a football field long with no more than a dozen mid-century, single-level, single-family houses, each with its own unique detail of brick walls, split-rail fences, white-washed or covered in ivy, and a variety of deciduous, fruit and a certain palm tree, the fronds from which would be cut annually on the Thursday preceding Good Friday and donated to the church. His favorite tree was his neighbor’s Mulberry that, in his first 10 years, when he lived on Rosalinda Drive, would never be trimmed, and never seem to grow old, only larger than the neighbor’s house it grew in front of. In the Fall, when the leaves tumbled to the ground, he’d bundle himself up in his father’s Army jacket and boots and kick the colors—from green to red and yellow to brown.
At the open-end of the street, his devoted dachshund Annabelle would lay down in the middle of the asphalt, prompting any oncoming cars to pause before proceeding, where he would run down the middle of the road, or, down the gutter chasing paper boats in the rain, or the aforementioned leaves, until he would be stopped by one of two seemingly permanently parked cars, when he’d gather up a pile in his arms, and run it around to the other side to continue his trek until he reached the circular dead-end, where lay a small flight of broad cement stairs that led up and out to the main avenue on which was the elementary school he’d come to attend soon enough.
Perched on the edge of childhood innocence, he stood still in awe between the quality of light and shadow cast across the horizon in the mid-evening twilight. Only the voice of his mother, or his friends stirring up a game of nighttime hide-n-seek, could call him back from the curiosity that attempted to entice him from the stairway and hedgerow of bushes that lined the sidewalk path and divided him from his Tom Sawyer world and the great beyond. These were his Indian Summer days and the seeming extent to his dreams of youth.
But then, in the early morning of the 9th of February 1971, when he was but four years old and would soon begin Kindergarten in August of that same year, an earthquake shook with a 6.6 magnitude. At first, he did not feel it since he was running once again. It wasn’t until he noticed the telephone poles and wires flinging back and forth did he realize something strange was happening. It was to be his first of many tremors throughout his life.
Act II
Four years pass, and the boy, now in 3rd Grade, runs yet again toward the light bulb-shaped end of the street, this time straight up the middle. His arms are flailing with a metal G.I. Joe lunchbox in hand in an attempt to make it in time for the school bus leaving on a special beginning-of-school field trip to Lion Country Safari, the popular wild animal park nestled up in the local hills. This particular expedition was a final journey, as the park was slated to become extinct, along with Frasier, their mascot “king” lion, so he didn’t want to miss it.
However, he’s running, again, but this time it’s due to running late, and this was to be his triumphant return from what seemed like a three-month absence, but he wasn’t really sure how long it had been—maybe it was only three weeks, perhaps three days. As his mother sent him off, quietly and unceremoniously, but in her own sweet way, such as checking that he had his lunch, backpack, and Cub Scout uniform, he recalled how his friend Rob had called on him the previous morning to join him on his walk to school. It was yet another one of his encouraging but fruitless attempts to help his friend who was still too embarrassed from having been gone from school for so long. He’d locked himself up in the bathroom “washing his hands.” The faucet ran for long minutes until Rob finally had to leave him with a promising, “Maybe I’ll see you later.”
Standing on the corner curb of the parking lot in front of the school office, his teacher, a one Ms. Reed (of whom the boy was especially fond but for reasons he was too young to fully understand) looked around and then took one final head count, but when his name came up, there was, again, no answer. She wondered if he would ever return. She ushered the students onto the bus that departed a minute later down the street—just as he rounded the corner. His pace slowed in his reoccurring embarrassment—making no effort to run after it or get their attention due to the further humiliation he feared he would face upon what now seemed a truly unlikely return. He turned and trod slowly homeward, his head in the proverbial disappointed downward position, his shoulders hunched and lunch box nearly touching the ground.
For a moment during his long trek, he feared reprisal from his mother, and maybe his father, too, for that matter, for missing yet another day of school, especially when it seemed that some sense of normalcy had returned to their family routine—for the time being. He contemplated running away. He could hold out with just the contents of his lunch—a Thermos of his mother’s sun tea and a fold-top plastic baggie containing a mayonnaise and Velveeta cheese sandwich on white bread. He considered hiding in Mr. Raymond’s tool shed on the other side of the alleyway behind their house; but he was a gardener by trade, so it would be too crammed full of lawn mowers and other gas-powered machines— the smell would drive him out, if the temperature didn’t get him first. He’d known the turmoil of too many hot summer and cold winter nights.
The boy then paused for a moment, recalling how his mother had begun to frequently disappear by the time he returned home from school in the afternoons, then there was the worry of what his dad might do to be concerned about, so he kept thinking of a place to hide until he remembered his favorite hide-n-seek spot—a large dark hollow in the bush adjacent to the cement stairs. He crawled in and waited there—for hours, despite the torturous thoughts of the uncertain punishments he believed awaited him. In the growing darkness of night, he finally saw his father driving his usual very slow cruise in his convertible Buick Oldsmobile in and around the cul-de-sac and then back down to park in front of their house. This was his habitual, customary practice, particularly after his very late return home from work—and the subsequent bar. He vigilantly watched his dad struggle from his car and stumble into the house, breaking his stare only a few moments later, surprised, when his mother came out and called, stepping off the sidewalk to look up and down the street. He held his breath for an endless moment, hesitant to reply. As dusk turned to dark, he watched the porch lights come on one at a time, increasing his awareness of the incorrigible mosquitoes. However, it was the echoing call of her voice in his head that he began to sense was somehow sans a sense of anger, and thus ultimately compelled him to finally run home, his arms at his side to mute the clanking of his lunchbox handle.
Creeping through the screen door, as not to draw any loud attention to his return, he saw his drunken father laid out on the couch, already asleep and snoring, while his mother sat in the kitchen, a glass of wine in her hand and staring out the window—a blank expression, as if she hadn’t yet noticed the sun had already set. His return surprised her, but she stood and greeted him calmly with a smile and deep-stare into his eyes, finished off with an encompassing hug, her right arm around the top of his back, her left wrapped tightly around his head—her hand rubbing his short hair. She didn’t bring up where he’d been, but simply asked, “Are you hungry?” In the tension-draining relief from the realization that he had avoided the punishment he was so sure awaited him, he let out a deep groaning cry—the tears streaming down his face. Between gasping breaths and sobs, he told her that he had missed the bus, and then, with his face buried in her apron and a muffled exclamation, he proclaimed that he would never go back to school again. After she unwrapped her arms from around him, he ran like a film in fast forward to his bedroom, slapping off the lights as he passed each wall switch, then flew under the suffocating yet mummy-like protection of his covers, and very slowly drifted to sleep unsure of exactly how to feel. The following morning, his mother was gone.
Act III
More than 30 years pass, and the boy, now a man, walks his son Buddy to the same elementary school he attended, passing the same cement stairs atop the same cul-de-sac street. He stops for a moment and glances, a pensive look on his face as he notices a fresh layer of shiny, black tar on the street, and the now larger-than-life Mulberry tree—full and green and still uncut. He looks up to see a 737 passenger jet on its landing descent, until Jack makes an anxious shout, “Come on dad! Hurry up, I don’t want to be late for my field trip to the museum!” causing him to shake off the daze, replying “I’m comin’ Bud!” and make long strides to catch up to him. Once the man hands off his son to his teacher, a one Mrs. Dayton, and saw him safely on the bus, he waves back to him through the window. Then man then puts his hands in his pants pockets and strolls back, down the sidewalk—back toward the cul-de-sac. At the top of the stairs, he stops again for a deliberate pause, this time to turn and ponder toward the far end, where his childhood home still stands—one tree grown, another cut down, an add-on room and new paint give him cause to wonder.
He could almost imagine his beloved rusty-brown dog sitting once again in the middle of the road sniffing the air and looking around, as if she were trying to find him. He glances at his watch and hesitates, nearly turning away, when the ground begins to shake, and he immediately recalls his first earthquake 40 years earlier. He looks up at the telephone lines above him, and then leaps down to a safer distance, where suddenly the quake stops—almost as if his feet hitting the ground caused the shaking to cease. As he looks around, it is clear this time that nothing is swaying, as if nothing had happened, unlike when he was just a kid.
Yet, there is a noticeable silence, until something calls back his attention—the distant familiarity of kids pointing imaginary rifles at each other playing army and making shooting sounds, such as one boy’s, which if spelled into words (onomatopoeia) would come out sounding like “be-an-arrow, be-an-arrow!” (to which others would reply, “you’re-an-arrow!”). “I got you Chris!” calls one kid whom he could just barely make out hidden behind the neighbors overgrown plum tree. Then, the din of several more boys begin to chime in, making a chorus of “All-ee, all-ee auction free!” He ponders if this was just a vivid recollection of his youth, or did he really hear and see kids playing? His curiosity—and a flash of his mother’s face tugging him—once again compels him to investigate.
The man turns one last time toward the dusty, cracked concrete stairs to contemplate just heading home, but instead, he continues down the asphalt street toward his old house. He begins to notice how old the tar now looks compared to when he saw it the first time he passed—cracks now split across a dull, weathered charcoal grey. He looks up to see that the trees seem shorter and bare, somehow. Even the colors are faded, as if he were looking at an old, sepia-toned B&W photo. He sees the kids now gathering together in the middle of the street as he steps toward them as if being lured.
Although they seem to ignore him at first, one of the kids who had a funny way of talking, not unlike a Bugs Bunny cartoon character, runs up and asks, “Hey mitter, who are you?” The man looks down with a smile and replies, “Hello, my name is John, what is your name?” “That’s funny mitter,…” quipped the boy, “…my name is John, too—everyone calls me John-John, but I don’t like it…maybe it’s cause I don’t know why.” The man thinks to himself, “John-John? Where have I heard that name before? Wasn’t that what they called President Kennedy’s son JFK, Jr.?” He tells John-John, “You know maybe it’s a famous name, like a president?!” Excitedly, the kids says, “Oh, well in that case, I like it now!…” then continues, “…you look like an important man, or a lawyer, or something. Are you going to my house?” His abruptness startles the man, who simply replies, “No…no, I was just…” he turns toward the stairs and once again notices the colorless scene, before continue his response, changing it from ‘…taking my son to school’ to “…I’m just out for a walk.”
The other kids began running toward a house where a woman came out to serve them all lemonade. They cry out, “Come on John-John! Before we drink it all!” The kid points toward the open-end of the street and said, “That’s my house—the one with the white fence—may dad calls it a spilt-rail, I don’t know why, but I helped him paint it…well, see ya later!” and then runs away with the others. The man realizes the kid had pointed toward his old house, which now looks just like it did when he was a kid—no room addition, same white fence his dad had also called “an old-fashioned split-rail” and he’d helped him paint it, too. The man is now desperately compelled to get a closer look. It is late August, and the heavy, warm winds picks up just as it did every year around this time—a sign of the beginning of Indian Summer. When he turns to look for the kid, to get a second glance, all of them have disappeared—the screen door of the woman’s house coming to a close, but not a soul in sight. He tells himself that they have all just gone indoors, perhaps to continue playing in her backyard. “Yeah, it’s a birthday party, and they’re going in the back to take turns swinging at the piñata,” he tries to convince himself, just like he’d done with the neighbors’ kids who once lived there.
He begins walking again, cautiously toward the house, the mulberry tree leaves blowing across the street in front of him. There are no cars, save for two—a 0s era Ford Falcon and an older model Ford truck with a camper shell that reminds him of John Steinbeck’s Rocinante from his book Travels with Charley that he’d read in college. The quiet from the lack of airliners on their flight path to the nearby airport caught his attention. He looks up in wonderment and reminds himself of the night of September 11th, when all planes were grounded, save for one solo fighter jet circling all night long overhead. He wishes again that he could have met and shaken the hand of that pilot “angel.” The moment is broken by a dog’s bark. Another screen door closes—this one with a peculiar thud. He turns looking toward the familiar reverberations coming from his childhood house and without questioning, follows them toward the front door.
Act IV
Pausing at the porch, he takes a minute to build up the courage to approach and ring the bell. Just as soon as he looks up, he notices the face of a woman staring at him through the dusty screen. “I knew you’d come back someday;…” she spoke calmly, “…you must be hungry.” It is his mother. She opens up the door and lets him in. In uncertainty and shock, but with a pinch of fearlessness, he follows her, where they sit at the kitchen table, this time with a glass of water placed where she’d sat all those long years ago staring out the window he envisioned in his mind.
“You’re back…” he stammered, “…where have you been?” She deflects his question by offering him a hot bowl of homemade chili, adding, “…just like you used to like it; it was the one dish I could make that made everyone happy.” He notices her apron tied around her slim waist but missing is the sullen look in her eyes that she used to have from her ‘round-the-clock drinking and empty marriage.
Opening the door of the refrigerator, she asks, “How about one of your dad’s beers?” as she looks up and hands one out to him. “He’s not here anymore, and I don’t like ‘em.” Partially out of a sense of courtesy and partially out of sentimentality, he replies promptly yet uncertainly, “Sure.” He smiles when he notices the can is a familiar blue with snow-capped mountains and isn’t modern aluminum but steel with a pull-tab opener, which he and his friends would save, bending and linking them to make belts or long strings of which to dangle like a curtain in their bedroom doorway.
The man and his mother then slowly begin a conversation that seems to last for hours beginning with the expected, “How have you been?” to “So, what happened?” She explains how her own father, only ever having wished for a boy, had treated her and his five aunts like tomboys, locking them in closets when he disapproved of their childish, girlish behaviors, and how all of this and his father’s own endless nights of drinking at the bar after work til past midnight had led to her own drinking and inability to know what true love was. She pauses and adds, like a critical caveat, “…until you were born,” she says looking intently at him with a smile. Then she smiles and recalls the mischief the boy had gotten into, but also how she never once laid a hand on him, “…not even a spanking!” But then her smile disappears, and she somberly continues, “…only one time, when I was drunk, I put soap in your mouth for sayin’ swear words with your friends.”
She tries to convince him that he was all she ever cared about, but that his father’s absences and her emotional past had led her to taking up wine—having to hide the myriad of bottles around the house so no one would notice, but that he and his friend Chris would eventually find, until her condition became volatile, once hitting him with the bristle-end of a broom. This was immediately followed by her departure the next day—forcing herself to leave with the intent of protect him from her increasingly destructive self and any further hurting the son she so dearly loved and thus offering him the possibility of a better life, which he would eventually come to have, thanks in great part to a neighborly family down the street who took him in after their son and he had become inseparable and so they fostered him when his father admitted he was no longer able to take care of the boy, nor himself for that matter.
The boy stands and smiles, puts out his arms and cups her hands in his, and looks into her hazel eyes, and lovingly tells her, “It’s okay mom, I love you.” She stands and they hug—his right arm around her back and his left hand cradling the back of her head as he tilts it down close to kiss the top of it. He then finishes, “It’s time for me—and you—to go. It’s all OK now…Heaven is right here.” They embrace for a long moment, her head rocking back and forth on his shoulder in a sort of “No, please don’t leave” reaction. He assures her, “Don’t worry mom, you’ll always be with me, and someday, we’ll be together again.”
Act V
He pushes open the screen door, and without turning around, pauses to wait for the familiar sound of it slamming shut, though it never comes. A gust of the late summer winds make him hesitate turning back around to see her one last time, instead stepping forward off the curb, where the winds then suddenly cease. He walks on down the seemingly less long street and back up the stairs. When he reaches the top, he looks up to notice the sky-blue sky intercepted by passenger jet, then smiles, until his concentration is broken by another familiar voice again calling to him, but this time it’s “Dad!” as he sees Buddy running down the sidewalk, lunch box clanking and school papers flailing in his hands.
“Dad! Dad! Our field trip was so cool! I think I saw a real mummy!” After he tells him, “That’s great, pal,” this time he pauses, turns, and takes one long last look at the houses on the dead-end street, seeing that the color has returned, and the mulberry tree cut down. With a turn, the two boys grab hands and head home, and on the way, he recalls when he and his friend Kindergarten friend Rob had both moved out of Orangewood but were reunited years later, when they walked to their new high school together, until the boy became a man and a husband and father, finally returning to Orangewood with a promise of hope for the proverbial better life, which he had been granted.
Closing Narration
The mulberry tree is gone, and he would read in the paper that the wild animal park had been plowed under to make way for yet more houses in his already crowded small-town-turned-city; but now he possesses some peace of mind for at least his thoughts are less congested with the uncertain memories of his past, thanks to his angels in Heaven, and The Twilight Zone.
